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Right, let's see if I can stay civil.
I don't mean to be obvious, but this seems to have omitted what I would suggest is the most compelling reason to make a film - to make a film. Now, a producer may want a film that sells out multiplexes, a director may want a film that provides conceptual and technical challenges, an actor may want a film that provides a meaty, Oscar-material role, or one that will pay for his or her next house.
Apart from the director's reasons in your hypothetical situation here, all these reasons for making a film boil down to making money for the people involved.
The challenge of adapting other material may be a factor, the popularisation of something those involved with the creation like may be another (certainly the makers of Troy, which is a film about the Trojan War directed by Wolfgang Petersen and starring Brad Pitt and Eric Bana, would no doubt assiduously claim that they wanted to send people beavering into the Iliad, which is a book set during the Trojan War written by something identified as Homer, starring Achilles, his wrath and others).
I was aware of Troy and the Iliad without your Cliff's Notes, but thanks. I find this supplementary reason pretty hard to swallow, though I agree that production teams do come up with it. I think it's a way of dressing up and dignifying the fact that, again, they thought this would be a moneyspinner.
However, the point is that at the end of the process there is a film where previously there was none.
I tend to believe that the film, within the mainstream "Hollywood" cinema, is a means to an end, ie. money (and kudos/credibility/plaudits, that also = money.)
I might have to temper this scepticism if we're talking about "independent" cinema adaptations, like for instance Ghost World (created by Daniel Clowes and, in its screen form, starring Thora Birch and Steve Buscemi). While not wanting to make simplistic distictions between cynical commercial mainstream and worthy, high-minded independent cinema, I find it easier to believe that a comic-book adaptation within the latter institutional context could be motivated by a genuine love for the comic and a desire to engage with it, perhaps promoting it to a new and wider audience.
My suspicion about the way mainstream American cinema works also affects my response to your example about Possession.
You may ask why there was a need to make a film from Possesion. The next logical question is why there was a need to make a book from the thought that became the book Possession. In both cases somebody has decided to create an object, and somebody else has decided that that object will sell.
Maybe it's old-fashioned, retrograde, romantic, but I would tend to draw a distinction between an author's decision to create a novel and a studio's decision to option it for adaptation. Turning a thought into a novel, even in your account which is meant to make the two seem parallel processes, has an air of Virginia Woolf about it -- the creative spark, the drive to make the intangible concrete, to pour one's consciousness upon the page &c.
Turning a novel into a film evokes, for me, visions of board meetings like that Orange cinema ad about not letting a mobile phone ruin your movie: can't we make Pemberley into more of a spectacular citadel? Couldn't we have Elizabeth and Jane Bennett just getting undressed together once, even if we're nixing the lesbian incest? I'm still angling for making Frank Churchill CGI, if we can't get Eminem for the role.
I exaggerate slightly but I think the creation of a novel, a solo work produced by one individual at a word processor on their own -- although of course it also involves the motivation of money and fame -- is very different from the process of collaboration, compromise and corporate dealing that an optioned novel goes through before it becomes a feature film.
So, if you are complaining that a film is not sufficiently faithful to its original source material, you need to work out what of that is formal and what based on specific scripting, directorial and acting decisions. ... So, to bring it back home, can The Filth, a comic book written by Grant Morrison, be a guaran-damn-tee that a film based on it would not work? I would say no. Can it be guaran-damn-teed that such a film would have to deal with the fact that its source material is in an entirely different medium, and that it was created in a way that exploits and enlists the elements of its medium in a way that could not be transferred directly to film? Yes, it can. However, so does every film that is made from ideas originally found in a book, a play, a historical event... the job of the writer, director and actors is to work out what elements could be included successfully in a film, and to amend those, include others, remove others yet. If, therefore, you go to see a film demanding that it be the same as the source from which it was taken, I don't think you will ever be pleased by any film that is comprehensible in identification as a film.
That's fair enough, and yes, I think some adaptations of fiction do work very well as films. Even if they retain the "spirit" and disregard much of the detail, like for instance Clueless (Emma) and B. Luhrmann's Romeo + Juliet (I shall not insult you by telling you the source material). Although neither are incredible works of art, I enjoyed both the novel and the film adaptation of High Fidelity although the film changes the setting from UK to US; and I think P. Jackson's LOTR trilogy arguably worked better than the books in some ways, eg. by cross-cutting between the different factions of the Fellowship rather than dealing with each in separate halves of The Two Towers.
I haven't seen the film adaptation of Ulysses, to take another example, but I hear some Joyceans respect and admire its attempt to film an unfilmable novel that you would think could only work in its original medium. For that matter, I think the film Trainspotting works really well by introducing playful visual stylistic traits that work as equivalent to, rather than the same as, the prose experiment in the original novel.
So, in theory yes I agree. The Filth could be done in a way that uses the potential of cinema in a fittingly similar but not identical way to the original comic book's exploration of that medium.
I suppose my misgivings stem from my suspicion that the people who adapt comic books generally don't seem to "understand" or care about the comic book. They don't seem to "get" it or really want to engage with what it's trying to do. They just want to create a franchise with action figures and get a deal with Burger King for Bruce Willis-as-Ned-Slade toys. |
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might hamper this discussion: because of this knowingness on your part I'm afraid I'm not sure what David Lodge you're referring to. I expect this means I haven't read it, but the title would have cleared this up.