An Open Book: How to Make a Great Film Adaptation, from The Shining to Trainspotting

Not every great novel makes a great movie, and sometimes it's the other way around. But regardless of the source text, or the treatment of popular characters, there's more than one way to write a successful adaptation. It's always fun to join a craze, like a Victorian going mad for a penny farthing. That's probably why, against my better judgment, I went to see Christopher Nolan's blockbuster Odyssey this summer and bought my ticket to attend.

It's always fun to join a craze, like a Victorian going mad for a penny farthing. That's probably why, against my better judgment, I went to see Christopher Nolan's blockbuster The Odyssey this summer and bought my ticket to join the popular panel discussion. Another divisive adaptation this year, Emerald Fennell's Wuthering Heights, had Danya and her husband arguing about it before watching the film. No doubt the makers of the recent film Sense and Sensibility also hoped that a lot of people would go and see it to find out if they hated it.

After all, very few of us leave the theater saying, "That's exactly how I pictured it." Or even less likely: "It was better than the book." We're probably pumping our fists at how they ruined the ending, dumbed it down, unforgivably threw in someone with the wrong hair, or betrayed a beloved character like last year's Thursday Murder Club failed.

But what makes a good adaptation? Like the Odyssey itself, and as all Nancy Meyers fans know: it's complicated. I've just written a book about the great heights and depths of adaptation, The Better Book, for which I subjected myself to some of the worst viewing experiences possible, including the soft rock opera musical Heathcliff. 1996 very bad The Island of Dr Moreau; And a terrible three-part edition of Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged. But I also saw many masterpieces that equaled or sometimes surpassed the basics. That's what I learned.

The first thing to say is that the quality of the source is irrelevant. I went into the research with fairly fixed ideas: for example, as Anthony Burgess wrote, "brilliant adaptations are almost always from second- or third-grade stories." That some works are "unfilmable". that classics have more "breathing space" on TV. I soon realized that none of this was true. Yes, sometimes workmanlike novels like the late 60s and early 70s trilogy of Jaws, The Godfather, and The Exorcist can be adapted to the screen with some level of genius. But great books can also make great movies: Trainspotting, The Go-Between, The Leopard and Burgess's own A Clockwork Orange are just a few. And sometimes, as in the case of The Da Vinci Code and Fifty Shades of Grey, a deeply stupid book becomes a deeply stupid movie.

Double quotes don't be too respectful... an adaptation should never be the best album

It is true that some books present themselves more easily. Jane Austen's love-forbidden unique plots are patterns that can cover any age, like the computerized pattern Cher Horowitz uses to program her clothes at the beginning of Clueless - plus wonderful free adaptations. Austen's novels contain the DNA of all rom-coms, as Robinson Crusoe is found in The Martian, the Gothic novel in horror films, or a Christmas carol in every Christmas movie. The short stories, with their twisting shocks and rush towards the final point, seem to be made for the cinema. My favorite movie, Don't Look Now, is based on a novel by Daphne du Maurier. The dark origins and stretch of myths and their close cousins, folklore and legend, make them endlessly adaptable, as they leave gaps for the filmmaker to fill in with his imagination.

Infidelity is usually useful. Some of the best adaptations flirt with the source material, take terrible liberties, and then abandon it like a love rat. "Steal the parts you need and then run as fast as you can," advised Paul Thomas Anderson. Hitchcock claimed to have read The Birds once before making his version and never thought about it again. (One screenwriter I spoke to told me that he was once asked not to read a novel he was adapting because the production company thought it would get in the way). As author and screenwriter Dennis Lehane once said, books and movies are completely different animals, "apples and giraffes." Adaptation is an act of translation from verbal to visual. A filmmaker must find his own language.

One of my favorite unfaithful adaptations is Alfonso Cuarón's 2006 Children of Men, and not just because it stars Clive Owen in his physical prime. The novel manages to turn a mental and theological novel from fellow conservative PD James into a dystopian thriller about populism, terror and how we treat immigrants, one that—though now two decades old—feels fresher with each passing year (James was delighted.) Cuarón used the novel as a jumping-off point, then left it behind to start his own adventure. to follow What remained was the original conceit: What if we lived in a world without children? The great "what-if" concepts of science fiction and speculative fiction lend themselves to fast-paced play: a vessel into which to pour a filmmaker's preoccupations and the anxieties of their day.

When writer-director Sally Potter reinvented Virginia Woolf's time-traveling fantasy Orlando, she treated it "as if the book had never existed" and turned it into a lavish book for a British institution that had just passed Section 28. This is the mantra of destruction as creation. In the hands of the right writer and director, a source can and should be forced to submit to their will: Stanley Kubrick betrayed Stephen King's vision of The Shining, but made an excursion. Heart of Darkness became a war epic with Apocalypse now. Red Dragon, well, became a Michael Mann movie, the hypnotic Manhunter. An adaptation should never be a hollow and successful album. Too much respect for a literary source can destroy it, which is why I think movies like The Hunger Games and The Road, which are romantically and stylishly made with little change, feel a little bloodless on screen to me.

Can anything really be loyal anyway, and to what? No story is 100% original. ("I didn't steal from anyone. I stole from everyone!") I don't even think you can be "faithful" to the "spirit" of a text, because the spirit is different for everyone. We all have our own little movies in mind when we read. Many consider The Great Gatsby to be the death knell for the United States. Adapters tend to think: "Parties!". I think Heathcliff is a psychopath who likes to hang small dogs. Successive managers clearly did not. I loved discovering that Jodie Foster lobbied hard for Clarice Starling in The Silence of the Lambs, because for her, the novel was about a woman saving another woman's life while "all these damn men" get in the way. An adaptation may be just a glimpse into another mind's eye, but their images rarely match the images we imagined.

Perhaps the most obvious example in this case is the choice of actors. As night follows day, Hollywood casts more beautiful than absolutely necessary, though it doesn't always reach Denise Richards in hot pants as a nuclear physicist in The World Is Not Enough levels. This could be intentional: in Robert Bloch's psychological novel, Norman Bates is physically repulsive. Hitchcock wanted the sweet-faced Anthony Perkins for the role to mislead the audience. Most of the time it's because, as critic Roger Ebert observed, cinema is a machine for creating empathy, so there's the thinking that the leads have to be "likable" – which backfired horribly when Bruce Willis was cast as a dried-up English journalist in the film. A disastrous adaptation of Tom Wolfe's Arrogance. But sometimes an actor who makes mistakes on paper can make a role his own, whether it's Margaret Rutherford as Miss Marple, Renee Zellweger as Bridget Jones, or Michael Caine as Harry Palmer in The Ipcress Case (he's northern and unnamed in Len Deaton's novels). Charisma goes a long way.

Perhaps in the end, it all boils down to feelings and emotions. As Anthony Minghella famously explained in his adaptation of Mr. Ripley, "You've had the drink and the taste that's left in your mouth is what you're leaving with." Irwin Wells said you should smell the books. Hossein Amini, who reinvented Pigeon's Wings as "noir in costume," wanted to capture that thrilling moment when "no one else in the world understood or experienced that book exactly like I did."

Returning to The Odyssey, I wonder why, even though Nolan did the right things, subjugating it to his worldview and unfaithfully reinventing it for our time, turning a trickster into a damaged veteran, the film left me feeling like I'd been in a war: long periods of tedium and violent waiting. Maybe, in the end, he overthought it and should have felt it instead? Or perhaps, as the late Hilary Mantel said of adaptation, you should "put down the text and dream it."

It Would Have Been Better by Louise Wilder (Oneworld, £14.99). To order a copy for £13.49 visit, delivery charges may apply.