Found in Translation

Screenwriters sound off on the delicate art of page-to-screen adaptation

By Matthew Hays

Take a great, critically-lauded novel, and then attempt to adapt it into a screenplay. One wonders why anyone would agree to the challenge.

There will be loyal fans watching, eagerly, to make sure the translation is meticulous and faithful. There will be producers complaining that their favourite bits got left out. And there might even be an author around to complain about their work being sullied. It’s enough to add multiple neuroses to a screenwriter’s already burdened mind, but many scribes don’t shy away from the complexities and challenges of page-to-screen adaptation.

Here, three working screenwriters discuss the pratfalls and pleasures of adaptation, that complex process brought to life so brilliantly in the self-referential film of the same name. Taking on someone’s already-heralded work and trying to take it to another medium–in particular film, which is so critically scrutinized–might seem a masochist’s folly, but screenwriters do avidly pursue the challenge.

Polley takes the challenge

In fact, some swear they really love it. Witness Sarah Polley, one of the country’s most famous young actors, who found herself the toast of September’s Toronto International Film Festival with her feature directorial debut, Away From Her, starring Julie Christie and Gordon Pinsent. The screenplay was adapted from Alice Munro’s critically-acclaimed short story “The Bear Came Over the Mountain” by Polley herself.

“I found it to be a really fantastic and liberating experience,” says Polley. “There’s always a certain degree of self-loathing when you’re dealing with your own work. You see the flaws. There were things about this short story that I never doubted, dialogue, parts of the piece I never fell out of love with. Of course, when you’re making a movie, especially a feature, it’s nice to know you’re going to be able to maintain that kind of enthusiasm.”

Munro’s story is a heady one, involving a woman with Alzheimer’s who enters into a particularly forgetful stage of her life. Her philandering husband decides it’s time to put her in a home. When there, the forgetful woman loses track of her husband and falls in love with another resident, who also happens to be married.

Polley says she was struck by the story right away when she read it on a flight from Iceland, where she’d just finished filming Hal Hartley’s No Such Thing. “At the time, I really wasn’t looking for something to adapt. Usually, if I really love the writing, I want it to be left alone. But this story was so cinematic, so visual, it just made perfect sense to turn it into a movie.”

Literary infatuation

Filmmaker and screenwriter Jeremy Podeswa (Eclipse, The Five Senses) reports similar feelings of literary infatuation when he read Anne Michaels’ debut novel Fugitive Pieces. In fact, “I knew about the book before it was published,” Podeswa reports. “I had heard about it and was intrigued right away, knowing Anne’s poetry already. I read it over ten years ago, when it first hit the stands–it was full of revelation, so moving and poetic, I knew it would make for a difficult adaptation to film but also loved the idea of doing it.”

For Podeswa, the draw was also a deeply personal one: the book involves the story of a Jewish lad who witnesses his family being killed during the Holocaust, and is then smuggled to relative safety in Greece. As an adult, he and his adopted family move to Canada. Podeswa’s father is a Holocaust survivor, so he says he felt an immediate emotional connection to Michaels’ work. “Fugitive Pieces moved me in a way that most books on the topic don’t. I felt a strong bond with the work from the beginning. I actually never thought I would address this family background through my work, but found myself drawn to this book.”

Jefferson Lewis, the author and screenwriter who has just completed the film adaptation of Emotional Arithmetic, Matt Cohen’s 1990 novel, says the adaptation urge did not hit him when he first encountered the book. “When I first read the novel, I was 170 pages in, and I though to myself, ‘This is great, but it’s not a movie.’ Then I found one part of the book, a few pages, that would be perfect on film.” Like Fugitive Pieces, Emotional Arithmetic also involves Holocaust survivors and how trauma is passed from generation to generation.

Inspiration from past adaptations

Not surprisingly, all three writers have adaptations they admire–not necessarily models to be emulated, but definitely works that inspire them that page-to-screen translations can and do work, often beautifully.

“The Hours was just brilliant,” says Lewis, of the film version of Michael Cunningham’s best-selling novel. “So intricate and clever.” Podeswa cites director Nicolas Roeg’s chilling 1973 film Don’t Look Now, from a screenplay by Allan Scott and Chris Bryant, based on Daphne Du Maurier’s novel. “But I think The Sweet Hereafter [Atom Egoyan’s adaptation of the Russell Banks novel] is one of the most brilliant adaptations ever,” says Podeswa. “I’m almost afraid to bring that up, because Atom and I have been linked creatively before, but the way in which he shifts through time, the way he handles a narrative told in pieces, it is extremely well handled.”

Polley also cites Egoyan’s work on Hereafter, which isn’t a shocker, seeing as she’s in the movie. “The things he chose to subtract from the novel, the things he chose to elaborate on–some very interesting choices,” notes Polley. She also praises The Thin Red Line, Terence Malick’s elaborate and artful epic anti-war film, based on the James Jones book. “That is also one of my favourites.”

For Polley, one of the key issues that arose from her experience adapting was the idea of remaining faithful. After all, she points out, books and films are two entirely different media, consumed in such entirely different ways. “Reading is such a solitary act. You never know if you’re being faithful in anyone else’s eyes, just in your own. I’ve been completely faithful though, in that I’m confident–I certainly didn’t invent the tone of the film.”

Lewis says that his own experience has led him to believe you can be too attached to the material. “When I first began with adaptations, I started on the wrong foot. I thought that if you loved the book, that would work best. I tried doing an adaptation of [Constance Beresford-Howe’s] The Book of Eve. I laid it out on the page, but it just wasn’t happening. I bashed out three or four different versions. I had to walk away from it–it was a hard lesson to learn, but I loved the book too much.” (The novel would ultimately find its way onto the big screen in 2002, when Quebec director-writer Claude Fournier would adapt it into a film of the same name.)

Podeswa says the very reasons some offered as evidence that Fugitive Pieces was unfilmable is what attracted him to the book. “Some argued it defied a film version. But at the core of the book is an extremely strong narrative. Yes, it’s very unconventional, and very poetic, but those are good things, things that gave it more cinematic appeal, not less. Some said it was impossible, but it didn’t scare me at all.”

For Polley, the very literary quality of many of Munro’s scenes also proved attractive. “There were some very unusual and distinctive bits of dialogue, written in ways that a screenwriter would never write while writing a movie. That was what was – and is – so great about them. They have a rich quality to them, something I left intact.”

See the Fall/Winter 2007 issue of Canadian Screenwriter for the complete article.