The Challenges of Adapting a Novel to the Big Screen

If you ask any author if they would want their novel to be adapted into a film, the majority of them will say, “yes” with great enthusiasm. I mean, who wouldn’t want to see their story come to life right before their eyes.

Many of the successful films from the past couple of years have actually stemmed from novels. The Hunger Games, published in 2008, was adapted into a movie, which was released in 2012. This movie brought in a non-sequel record of $152.5 million in North America alone. The Harry Potter books created one of the largest film franchises of all time. The Time Traveler's Wife brought in tears not only from readers, but from viewers in movie theaters as well. The classic Pride & Prejudice brought Mr. Darcy to life through the movie adaptation for all those who fell in love with him through reading the book.

Although these were all extremely successful adaptations, they were not made over night.

Length

The first challenge in adapting your favorite novel into a film is that the length of the book is generally much longer than the screenplay itself. Generally, each page of a screenplay generates one minute on screen. If the screenplay is 120 pages long, that correlates two hours of screen time. Most movies do not last much longer than that. Most books are longer than that, which means that the screenplay writer is going to have to cut a lot out of the book in order to fit it all into the suggested timeframe.

A great example of this is the Song of Ice and Fire series that has been adapted into Game of Thrones on HBO. George R. R. Martin is infamous for his extremely long books, each averaging around 1,000 pages. So far, for the first two books, HBO has decided to cut them into 10 episodes, each running about 55 minutes long. If HBO wanted to cover everything in the books, they would need a much longer season. However, they made the choice to cut things out in order to make the best experience for the viewers.

The first four books in the Song of Ice and Fire Series, the longest of which is around 1,216 in US paperback. 

Character Development

The second challenge that many screenwriters face is keeping the essence of character alive. In books, we are able to see into the characters mind. We are able to hear and understand what they are thinking. However, in film we have to be able to grasp these characteristics through their actions and dialogue with other characters. Listening to a person think throughout the entire movie would not exactly be the most entertaining. This is where the famous line “show, don’t tell” comes into play.

George R. R. Martin likes to have a lot of inner voice within his books. Whenever we read a chapter, we know exactly what each character thinks about a particular situation. The reader often gets to know a lot of background information about the character and we hear stories about their lives before the beginning of the first book. It would be really boring if HBO decided to keep in all the stories that were told because all we would be looking at on screen is someone sitting there talking for a long time. This is not very pleasing to a viewer, which is why HBO decided to cut a lot of this out.

Daenerys Targaryan and Khal Drogo

Plot Changes

When companies decide to buy the film rights to a novel, they include a clause that says they are allowed to make some changes to the plotline. This is not because they did not like how things played out in the book; they just feel that something else would be more pleasing for an audience to watch. These changes are generally very small and the overarching theme and plot of these books are held intact.

For example, in the books of Game of Thrones, Jeyne Westerling is a character who moves the plot in a very specific direction (I won’t give anything away for those who have not seen the TV show or read the books). This character has a family lineage that is important to the plotline. However, in the second season on HBO, Jeyne Westerling was changed to Talisa Maegyr, a girl from a completely different realm with a different background. Since the characters name and background was changed, the writers may or may not have something different in store for her in season three. There are also two very important characters that were eliminated from the second season completely, and their features were combined into a pre-existing character.

Talisa Maegyr

These changes are going to be very difficult for those fans who first fell in love with the books. They will hate the writers, producers and directors for making these changes. However, the thing is that the show or movie is never going to be exactly like the book. No matter what, something, even if it is minuscule, will be different. Fans will just have to trust in the writers to make the best possible adaption they could.