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It can go both ways. And it can go both ways in various methods. Not got much time to expand fully - but I'll give you two examples of good (imho) films of books that do it in different ways.
1): The Hunt for Red October. It's actually very, VERY different to the book. Lots of plot changes.But overall, it's the same thing, same ending, same characters, same idea. Now the book's no work of art, but it's certainly tightly plotted and nice and tense, which is all it set out to be. The film avoids things that might have been harder/more expensive to shoot, and doesn't just replace them, but juggle things around... and it comes out tense and tightly plotted. And Alec Baldwin's rather good.
2):Catch-22. This really surprised me: the film is EXACTLY like the book. It's almost all in there. OK, it was costly, but hell, for me it works.
The thing is, the point about a novel is the length and depth. A movie HAS to condense it.
By contrast, movies based on short stories (cf: Memento, Don't Look Now) work REALLY well. The short story is the PERFECT movie medium - because the director can EXPAND on what he has. That's what directors do: they expand on the script through their use of their actors and cameras, etc. Give a director a screenplay which is condensed from a novel... and he'll have to condense big epic emotions/characters/motives again. And that don't work.
Does that make sense? |
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