Film adaptation
A film adaptation transfers the details or story of an existing source text, such as a novel, into a feature film. This transfer can involve adapting most details of the source text closely, including characters or plot points, or the original source can serve as loose inspiration, with the implementation of only a few details. Although often considered a type of derivative work, film adaptation has been conceptualized recently by academic scholars such as Robert Stam as a dialogic process.
While the most common form of film adaptation is the use of a novel as the basis, other works adapted into films include non-fiction, autobiographical works, comic books, scriptures, plays, historical sources and even other films. Adaptation from such diverse resources has been a ubiquitous practice of filmmaking since the earliest days of cinema in nineteenth-century Europe. In contrast to when making a remake, movie directors usually take more creative liberties when creating a film adaptation, changing the context of factors such as audience or genre.
Fidelity
The Fidelity Argument
One aspect that is usually considered for analyzing adaptations is the fidelity argument. This regards the discussion between scholars, reviewers, or fans, evaluating the effectiveness and success of an adaptation based on how faithfully it follows the original plot and details. This can involve the common discourse of the "book being better than the movie" without considering the efforts that go towards a film adaptation.A film can choose to stay faithful, or stray from the original source text details, but regardless, this medium is created with the use of more elements. Unlike a piece of media like a novel, a film has many aspects to consider, including the script, the music, the actors and their performances, images and shots, and sound effects. All these elements must work together to translate the source material into a feature film. As a type of media that is composed of several elements, a film's runtime often impacts the final product too.
A film adaptation may go against adhering to fidelity for a number of reasons, including the desire for a shift in the time period, cultural context, or perspective of the original plot, and a shift in overall audience. On the other hand, a film adaptation may consider strong fidelity to help promote the work if it is already tied to a popular writer or existing title, especially since it can help financially.
It can be difficult to judge or account for the effectiveness of a film adaptation based solely on fidelity, especially since an adaptation also exists as its own entity outside of the original source text. Although one can consider the original ideas and themes being consistently transposed, an adaptation can also be examined for the new elements it brings audiences.
Types of Fidelity
One way to think of fidelity as other than a measure of success is as different levels of faithfulness to help facilitate discourse. Although not all adaptations aim towards focusing on fidelity for their final product, these labels may help consider how much of a story translates through history.Close Adaptation
A close adaptation would help define a work that adheres to fidelity closely, implementing most, if not all, details from the original source text. This would include embedding a majority of the original characters, plot points, and timeline. An example of this would include To Kill a Mockingbird that closely adapted a majority of the details from Harper Lee's 1960 novel of the same name, To Kill a Mockingbird.Loose Adaptation
A loose adaptation would include any work that mainly uses the original source text as inspiration, straying far from fidelity. This can include instances of only implementing one or two elements, such as the protagonist or title of the original text. This type of adaptation is where the most creative liberties are taken. An example of this would include Clueless, that was loosely adapted from Jane Austen's 1815 novel, Emma, into a modern day context.Intermediate Adaptation
An intermediate adaptation would consist of a work that falls in between a close and loose adaptation, as it both embeds original source text details, takes creative liberties to incorporate new elements, and/or excludes certain original details. An example of this would include What's Eating Gilbert Grape that was adapted from Peter Hodge's 1991 novel of the same name, What's Eating Gilbert Grape, that closely adapts a few details, while also excluding certain original characters.Elision and interpolation
In 1924, Erich von Stroheim attempted a literal adaptation of Frank Norris's novel McTeague with his film Greed. The resulting film was 9½ hours long, and was cut to four hours at studio insistence. It was then cut again to around two hours. The result was a film that was largely incoherent. Since that time, few directors have attempted to put everything in a novel into a film. Therefore, elision is all but essential.In some cases, film adaptations also interpolate scenes or invent characters. This is especially true when a novel is part of a literary saga. Incidents or quotations from later or earlier novels will be inserted into a single film. Additionally and far more controversially, filmmakers will invent new characters or create stories that were not present in the source material at all. Given the anticipated audience for a film, the screenwriter, director or movie studio may wish to increase character time or to invent new characters. For example, William J. Kennedy's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Ironweed included a short appearance by a prostitute named Helen. Because the film studio anticipated a female audience for the film and had Meryl Streep for the role, Helen became a significant part of the film. However, characters are also sometimes invented to provide the narrative voice.
Interpretation as adaptation
There have been several notable cases of massive inventive adaptation, including the Roland Joffe adaptation of The Scarlet Letter with explicit sex between Hester Prynn and the minister and Native American obscene puns into a major character and the film's villain. The Charlie Kaufman and "Donald Kaufman" penned Adaptation, credited as an adaptation of the novel The Orchid Thief, was an intentional satire and commentary on the process of film adaptation itself. All of those are cases of Nathaniel Hawthorne's point. The creators of the Gulliver's Travels miniseries interpolated a sanity trial to reflect the ongoing scholarly debate over whether or not Gulliver himself is sane at the conclusion of Book IV. In those cases, adaptation is a form of criticism and recreation as well as translation.Change is essential and practically unavoidable, mandated both by the constraints of time and medium, but how much is always a balance. Some film theorists have argued that a director should be entirely unconcerned with the source, as a novel is a novel and a film is a film, and the two works of art must be seen as separate entities. Since a transcription of a novel into film is impossible, even holding up a goal of "accuracy" is absurd. Others argue that what a film adaptation does is change to fit, and the film must be accurate to the effect, the theme, or the message of a novel and that the filmmaker must introduce changes, if necessary, to fit the demands of time and to maximize faithfulness along one of those axes.
In most cases adaptation, the films are required to create identities since they are not specified in the original material. Then, the influence of film-makers may go unrecognized because there is no comparison in the original material even though the new visual identities will affect narrative interpretation. Peter Jackson's adaptations of The Lord of the Rings trilogy and The Hobbit by author JRR Tolkien represent an unusual case since many visual and stylistic details were specified by Tolkien. For the Harry Potter film series, author JK Rowling was closely consulted by the filmmakers, and she provided production designer Stuart Craig with a map of Hogwarts' grounds and also prevented director Alfonso Cuarón from adding a graveyard scene because the graveyard would appear elsewhere in a later novel.
An often overlooked aspect of film adaptation is the inclusion of sound and music. In a literary text, a specific sound effect can often be implied or specified by an event, but in the process of adaptation, filmmakers must determine specific the sound characteristics that subliminally affects narrative interpretation. In some cases of adaptation, music may have been specified in the original material. In Stephenie Meyer's 2005 Twilight novel, the characters Edward Cullen and Bella Swan both listen to Debussy's Clair de lune and Edward composes the piece Bella's Lullaby for Bella. While Clair de lune was a pre-existing piece of music, Bella's Lullaby was not and required original music to be composed for the 2008 movie adaptation.
In the 2016 sci-fi film 2BR02B: To Be or Naught to Be adapted from the story by Kurt Vonnegut, the film-makers decided to abandon Vonnegut's choice of music. They stated that they felt that it worked in his prose only because it was not actually heard. Filmmakers' test screenings found that Vonnegut's style of music confused audiences and detracted from narrative comprehension. The film's composer, Leon Coward, stated, "You can try to be as true to Vonnegut's material as possible, but at the end of the day also you’re working with the material that you as a team have generated, not just Vonnegut's, and that’s what you've got to make work."
Theatrical adaptation
Stage plays are frequent sources for film adaptations.Many of William Shakespeare's plays, including Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, and Othello, have been adapted into films. The first sound adaptation of any Shakespeare play was the 1929 production of The Taming of the Shrew, starring Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks. It was later adapted as both a musical play called Kiss Me, Kate, which opened on Broadway in 1948, and as the 1953 Hollywood musical of the same name. The Taming of the Shrew was again retold in 1999 as a teen comedy set in a high school in 10 Things I Hate about You, and also in 2003 as an urban romantic comedy, Deliver Us from Eva. The 1961 musical film West Side Story was adapted from Romeo and Juliet, with its first incarnation as a Broadway musical play that opened in 1957. The animated film The Lion King was inspired by Hamlet as well as various traditional African myths, and 2001's O was based on Othello.
Film adaptations of Shakespeare's works in languages other than English are numerous, including Akira Kurosawa's films Throne of Blood, The Bad Sleep Well and Ran ; and Vishal Bhardwaj's "Shakespearean trilogy" consisting of Haider, Omkara and Maqbool.
Another way in which Shakespearean texts have been incorporated in films is to feature characters who are either actors performing those texts or characters who are somehow influenced or effected by seeing one of Shakespeare's plays, within a larger non-Shakespearean story. Generally, Shakespeare's basic themes or certain elements of the plot will parallel the main plot of the film or become part of a character's development in some way. Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet are the two plays which have most often been used in this way. Éric Rohmer's 1992 film Conte d'hiver is one example. Rohmer uses one scene from Shakespeare's A Winter's Tale as a major plot device within a story that is not based on the play at all.
In Britain, where stage plays tend to be more popular as a form of entertainment than currently in the United States, many films began as a stage productions. Some British films and British/American collaborations that were based on successful British plays include Gaslight, Blithe Spirit, Rope, Look Back in Anger, Oh! What a Lovely War, Sleuth, The Rocky Horror Picture Show, Shirley Valentine, The Madness of King George, The History Boys, Quartet, and The Lady in the Van.
Similarly, hit Broadway plays are often adapted into films, whether from musicals or dramas. Some examples of American film adaptations based on successful Broadway plays are Arsenic and Old Lace, Born Yesterday, Harvey, A Streetcar Named Desire, The Odd Couple, The Boys in the Band, Agnes of God, Children of a Lesser God, Glengarry Glen Ross, Real Women Have Curves, Rabbit Hole, and Fences.
On one hand, theatrical adaptation does not involve as many interpolations or elisions as novel adaptation, but on the other, the demands of scenery and possibilities of motion frequently entail changes from one medium to the other. Film critics will often mention if an adapted play has a static camera or emulates a proscenium arch. Laurence Olivier consciously imitated the arch with his Henry V, having the camera begin to move and to use color stock after the prologue, indicating the passage from physical to imaginative space. Sometimes, the adaptive process can continue after one translation. Mel Brooks' The Producers began as a film in 1967, was adapted into a Broadway musical in 2001, and then adapted again in 2005 as a musical film.