Good book, great film

When he was asked to be guest director for a festival dedicated to films based on books, Jonathan Coe set out to disprove the adage that great literature makes terrible movies In the course of their famous book-length interview, François Truffaut once asked Alfred Hitchcock about his approach to literary adaptation, and Hitch’s response was as magisterial, worldly and mischievous as one would expect: “What I do is to read a story only once, and if I like the basic idea, I just forget all about the book and start to create cinema. Today I would be unable to tell you the story of Daphne du Maurier’s The Birds . I read it only once, and very quickly at that.” Hitchcock’s comment was the first thing that occurred to me when, towards the end of last year, I was approached with an interesting proposition. “From Page to Screen” is the name of a small film festival which takes place in Bridport, Dorset. It’s now in its third year and, as its title suggests, is dedicated exclusively to films which are adapted from literary sources. This year, for the first time, the organisers decided that they wanted to invite a guest director to oversee the programme. I accepted the offer at once, and then almost immediately wondered what I’d let myself in for: because the truth is that 99 times out of 100, I’m with Hitchcock on this one. Draw up one of those faintly ludicrous but fascinating lists of the 20 greatest novels, and then do the same for movies: do they match up, at all? Of course not. Joyce’s Ulysses might well be on the first list, but Joseph Strick’s Ulysses (1967) certainly won’t be on the second. Pride and Prejudice could possibly be on the first, but neither Robert Z Leonard’s nor Joe Wright’s adaptations will make the second. And none of these examples is a travesty, exactly, although we could all name some of those if we wanted to: film history – especially recent film history – is littered with examples where a good novel has been transformed, not into an average movie, but an outright disaster: Captain Corelli’s Mandolin and The Bonfire of the Vanities spring immediately to mind. Looking a little more closely at what Hitchcock said gives us a clear explanation of why this is so often the case. The question Truffaut specifically put to him was whether he would ever consider making a screen adaptation of a great novel such as Crime and Punishment . To which the director answered: “Well, I shall never do that, precisely because

Posted by on April 1, 2011. Filed under News, Politics, World News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.