Literary carnival notes 2: book-to-film adaptations

[Did a shorter version of this for my Sunday Guardian column]

At the Times of India Literary Carnival, I participated in a panel about books being adapted into films. Adeptly moderated though the discussion was – by author, screenwriter and all-round funny man Anuvab Pal – there’s no way an hour-long session can cover all bases on this wide-ranging topic. Still, it was a good excuse to put together some of my scattered thoughts about adaptation. Here goes:

One of my peeves as a film buff is that too many reviews these days discuss movies almost exclusively in terms of their plots. Overemphasis on story has the effect of neglecting how the story is told with the techniques that cinema has at its disposal (and which differentiate it from literature). It also fosters a culture where some reviewers (both in mainstream and online media) don’t even feel the need to be acquainted with the most rudimentary camera movements: the difference between a pan and a tracking shot, for example, or between a match cut and a jump cut.

If you even mention these things while discussing a film, you might be accused of getting “too technical”, but this is basic moviemaking grammar. It would be unthinkable for a professional book reviewer to not know the difference between active voice and passive voice, or between a first-person and third-person narrative. (Actually a good book reviewer would be expected to know much more, but I’m deliberately setting the bar very low here!) It’s a pity then that movie critics are held to much lower standards simply because cinema is such a popular and egalitarian form.

Anyway, this may be something to keep in mind while assessing the quality of an adaptation and the ways in which a film deviates from the book it was based on. One of the things that came up during our discussion was that the high quality of a literary work does not necessarily translate into high quality in the movie made from it. (If that were the case, a stationary-camera recording of a good stage production of Hamlet would automatically be a great film.) As our co-panellist Sooni Taraporevala, the screenwriter of such films as Salaam Bombay and The Namesake, put it: “A film mustn’t simply be an illustration of the book.”


I also liked the term Sooni used – “spiritual DNA” – to refer to the essence of a literary work, which is what an adapting screenwriter should mainly be concerned with. Thus, a good adaptation might capture the essential theme or mood of a book even if superficial details of period, setting and character names are altered. Shakespeare is a good example: there have been Japanese, Russian and Indian film versions of his work, made in languages that are arguably twice removed from the 16th century English he worked in. There have also been modernised versions, such as the 1995 Richard III which shifted the action to the pre-World War II years and included a scene where Richard speaks part of his “winter of our discontent” soliloquy while standing at a men’s urinal.

If you’re a purist, such changes might seem sensationalistic, but I think the film catches the essence of Shakespeare’s memorable protagonist: the self-loathing mixed with self-pitying, the insatiable appetite for scheming and deceiving, the need to avenge himself on everyone around him. (Another example in a similar vein: in Roman Polanski’s excellent Macbeth, Lady Macbeth does her sleepwalking scene in the nude. It has been cynically noted that the film was co-produced by Playboy, but I don’t think there’s anything gratuitous about the scene itself; it works quite well as a depiction of the sudden vulnerability of a character who has been so thoroughly in control for most of the play.)

But often, spiritual DNA isn’t easy to define, especially when adaptation involves a big change in period or setting. John Milius and Francis Ford Coppola adapted Joseph Conrad’s 1903 novel Heart of Darkness into Apocalypse Now, significantly updating the story – Conrad’s themes of imperialistic hegemony, exploitation and the savagery in human nature were set in a story about a man from a “civilised” country (England at the height of its powers) journeying into a “place of darkness” (the African Congo), and the film placed these ideas in the context of what America was doing to Vietnam in the 1970s. Yet the differences between the two works are just as important: Conrad’s book is full of darkness and despair, but it has a moral compass – a sense that one can visit the darkest areas of the soul and return with one’s sanity intact – whereas Apocalypse Now is a more nihilistic work – it’s very much a product of a century that had seen two world wars, nuclear destruction and the greatest horror of all, the Holocaust.

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Earlier at the festival, I spoke with the Pakistani writer Mohsin Hamid, whose novel The Reluctant Fundamentalist is being made into a film by Mira Nair. “I didn’t realise writers and filmmakers were such different sorts of people,” he said jovially, relating his admiration for how attuned Nair was to the activities of every last person on her set. Working in seclusion is central to what writers do, whereas film directors – even the relatively introverted ones – have to be adept at managing groups of people. This personality conflict between writers and directors (and occasionally between writer-directors and money-minded producers) has shaped the course of movie history, providing some hugelyentertaining anecdotes along the way. (Walking through a long hotel corridor that morning before leaving for the fest venue, I had a vision of the apocalyptic, burning-hotel climax of the Coen Brothers’ Barton Fink, a film about a hapless screenwriter coming to Hollywood and ending up, quite literally, in Hell.)

But there are also times when a serendipitous collaboration occurs between two people who might seem very different “types”. Consider Ruskin Bond and Vishal Bhardwaj. Bond’s writing style is genteel in the old-fashioned English way, the prose Spartan and direct; Bhardwaj’s films tend to be baroque, set in the Indian hinterland and peopled by rough-speaking types. The two men barely speak a common language, but I watched them in conversation at an event earlier this year and realised that in some things – notably in their shared penchant for black humour – they were on exactly the same wavelength. This helps explain their friendship and frequent collaboration, most notably on Bond’s children’s story The Blue Umbrella, which Bhardwaj made into a film that was much lusher in tone than Bond’s story (right down to the claustrophobia-inducing close-ups of Pankaj Kapoor as the greedy shopkeeper). It’s an example of a really good adaptation that doesn’t try to be slavishly faithful to its source material.

On the question of slavish faithfulness: when a literary work is being turned into a commercial or semi-commercial film, it’s almost inevitable that there will be changes that the original writer doesn’t care for; there will be a certain amount of pandering to the star system, and so on. During the audience Q&A, someone mentioned the “Dola re Dola” song in Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s version of Devdas, which brought together Paro and Chandramukhi, two characters who have nothing to do with each other in the original story. Even defenders of Bhansali’s opulent filmmaking style would probably concede that a large part of the motivation for the scene was having Madhuri Dixit and Aishwarya Rai together on screen for a spectacular, paisa-vasool dance performance.


I wrote in this post about R K Narayan’s sardonic essay about the making of Guide. The process of “glamorising” his small-town story and its characters would have begun at the point where Dev Anand and Waheeda Rehman – big stars with established screen personas – were cast in the roles of Raju the guide and Rosie the dancer. And of course, many changes were made to the story itself. But however much one admires and sympathises with Narayan the writer, the film must ultimately be judged on its own terms (and many movie buffs would agree that the Hindi version of Guide is an outstanding achievement in commercial filmmaking). There are many instances of movies that are excellent in themselves while being less than satisfying as adaptations.

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During our session Sooni spoke interestingly about how, when turning a novel into a screenplay, she had to find an exterior expression for the interiority of a character’s thoughts. This must have been especially relevant to her adaptation of Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake, because the book had surprisingly little dialogue; mostly it took the form of an omniscient narrator telling us about the lives and thoughts of Gogol and the other characters. Sooni had to create voices for these people, who had to be depicted on screen by flesh-and-blood actors who would actually talk to each other.

Writing aside, there are thousands of instances of a seemingly minor decision by a filmmaker adding layers to the story he is adapting – from Satyajit Ray’s use of Ravi Shankar’s shehnai music at key emotional points in Aparajito (based on Bibhutibhushan Banerjee’s book which, needless to say, did not use music of any sort as an accompaniment to a dramatic scene!) to Stanley Kubrick filming a frenetic orgy in fast motion (and with a fixed camera impassively recording the action) in A Clockwork Orange (based on Anthony Burgess’s novel, which was widely believed to be unfilmable). I'll be putting up a few more notes on this subject in the coming weeks, with more examples. Meanwhile, here are some earlier, related posts: Susannah’s Seven Husbands from short story to script; R K Narayan and Guide; The Namesake; Polanski’s Macbeth; my Yahoo column on story and storytelling.