Easy as Pi: Adapting Book to Film

Every spring in Monaco publishers and members of the film industry meet at the Forum International Cinéma & Littérature, thanks to the beneficence of his majesty, Prince Albert. A large room is set up with tables where publishers from around the world greet wandering filmmakers and describe why it is they feel such and such a book (in most cases many such and such books) will make wonderful films. The only problem is that usually the books do not.

I was asked last year why this is so, and I described the situation as follows. "Adapting a book into a movie is a piece of cake. All the screenwriter must do is take five hundred pages, thirty characters, twenty chapters, and volumes of internal thought and convert it to a hundred and twenty pages (at most), three characters (at most), three acts (no more, no less), and make it all visual." It is equivalent to taking a circle with a diameter running through it and converting the relationship to a number. The result is pi, and pi is, and always will be, irrational. Circles are beautiful things. Numbers are beautiful things. But there is no way to make a circle into a precise number. And there is no way to make a novel into a precise movie. Some things, often a lot of things, are lost.

In the last few years I have been given The Legend of Bagger Vance, The Notebook, The Time Traveler's Wife and My Sister's Keeper, among others, to adapt, and the first thing I do, always, after reading the book is try to determine what it was about the book that prompted the studio and/or producer to spend the money to buy it. Often it is none of the reasons they say.

With The Legend of Bagger Vance, the book spoke personally to Robert Redford and to the producer, Jake Eberts. With The Notebook, the studio thought it had a great story and they could cast it in a way that would draw both young and older audiences. Time Traveler's Wife was no different - a great love story, but, more than that, a unique love story. My Sister's Keeper had a great moral problem and some great characters. It, too, could play to young and older audiences.

But none of this was really, to my mind, why each book was viewed as material for a great film. With The Legend of Bagger Vance, it was the magic. With The Notebook it was the heartbreak. With The Time Traveler's Wife it was the juxtaposition of the beauty and anguish of love. With My Sister's Keeper it was the truth of the feelings.

What this meant for me was, at the end of The Legend of Bagger Vance, the audience had to feel they'd been on a magical journey. At the end of The Notebook, the audience had to be in tears over the heartbreak of it all. At the end of The Time Traveler's Wife, the audience had to be breathless from the beauty and anguish of the experience. At the end of My Sister's Keeper, the audience had to feel that this was their family, their life, and could easily have been their moral journey; they must be saddened and exhilarated at the same time.

For me, this is how a screenwriter (or this particular screenwriter, in any event) begins an adaptation. I need to determine what grabbed me emotionally about the book (as it no doubt did to the studio or producer, even though they might not have been completely aware of it), and this becomes the foundation of my work and underlies every scene as I proceed.

It is also a handy way of jettisoning all that must go. If it doesn't contribute to the underlying emotion to be conveyed, it goes. One asks oneself, "Which characters contribute to this underlying emotion? What parts of the story? What seeming digressions?"

Interestingly, I usually find the books I am given to adapt can easily be broken down into a three-act structure. I think the studio or producer sensed this instinctively when reading it. They "saw" it as a film. It may have had great characters. It may have had a great story. But they knew it could be constructed into three acts.

Somehow, as solid as the book's three acts might be, the endings, strangely, never seem to work. They may work as the ending of a book (although, as a novelist, I'm often not so sure), but, as a film, the endings rarely do. The most flagrant example is The Notebook. I felt strongly that for this to work, the two main (older) characters, corny as it may seem, had to die (as they did not in the book), and they had to die together. That is the ultimate fantasy of an eternal love: that, at the end, you die in each other's arms. Then we weep.

Similarly, with My Sister's Keeper, without giving away the ending since the film has not been released (or shot), I felt strongly that an audience couldn't sit through two hours of wondering whether or not the thirteen-year-old girl would donate her kidney to her sixteen-year-old sister or let her die - and then not give her a chance to decide. While it may work wonderfully for a novel, the audience needs resolution in a film.

And so this is why so many (most) books do not make good films. It is not that there are no interesting characters, or even an interesting story. It is that there is no emotional core to infuse the film throughout all 120 minutes and engage the audience; or that the story, great as it is, simply can not be broken down into three simple acts; or it has no dramatic ending. Of the thousand or so books offered at the forum in Monaco, fewer than three percent end up being optioned or bought for film projects. A circle is a circle, and a number is a number.

At the end of it all, for those who are fortunate enough to come upon a book with genuine filmic possibilities, there are no special techniques or secrets to adapting it. Once the emotional core of the film has been determined and the story has been honed into three solid acts, it is just a matter of a writer slogging through the fields of script-making: developing great characters, constructing wonderful dramatic or funny scenes, and keeping the story going all the while. And, for this, you just do the best you can.