I want to go back to the movie/book notion that I talked
about last week. It seems more and more
often I see movie trailers and turn to my husband and say, “I read that
book. It was awesome. I wonder how they’re going to do the
movie.” Translating books into movies is
nothing new. In fact, they’ve even
gotten to the point of novelizing movies.
They go hand in hand, even though they aren’t really the same.
Like I said last week, I used to be very judgmental about
books and movies, but then I heard a screenplay writer and a novelist talk
about the difference between the two. A
film has limited time in which to tell its story. Usually, that fits into the 2-hour time
slot. There is a lot in a book that
can’t be condensed into that amount of time.
There can also be a lot of subplots and different character stories in a
novel that won’t necessarily translate well onto screen. A screen writer has to pick what they think
is the most important/interesting story line in the book and put that onto
screen. Are they always right? Of course not. We’ve all seen the results.
I believe the reason the vast majority of us find the book
more enjoyable than the movie is because it becomes a deeply personal
experience. Using the author’s words, we
build the characters and the world in our minds. We project our experiences and emotions onto
them, and we form an attachment. It’s
possible to do that with a film, but it’s not on the same level as a book. When someone else brings their vision to the
story, which is often what happens when it is translated onto the screen, it
takes away from our personal experience.
I recently read The Serpent and the Rainbow by Wade Davis
and then watched the movie of the same name by Wes Craven. The book was amazing. Dr. Davis’s narrative was incredibly engaging
and fantastic. It felt more like fiction
than it did nonfiction. His emotion came
through the pages, I felt what he went through.
The movie wasn’t that spectacular. Even if I hadn’t read the book beforehand, it
would have been slow. The emotion was
missing, so was the connection with the other characters. At the same time, I knew what he was
doing. He was trying to portray the very
complex social and political environment of Haiti, along with their religion,
in a short amount of time. Wes Craven
was also trying to make it horror, so he used a lot of visual clues to scare
the audience.
I know a few people that this movie scared the hell out
of. The thought of someone else having
control of their mind frightened them to the core. They didn’t read the book, but they didn’t
have to. The experience of the film was
enough for them. And that’s fine. Everyone experiences things differently.
I’m pretty sure that no movie is ever going to be better
than the book because the experience between watching and reading is so much
different. I have seen some that come
very close (No Country for Old Men being one I can think of off the top of my
head, but it also followed the book almost word for word). The one thing to remember is that you have to
watch and experience books and movies for what they are, not what they could be.
