Anthony McCarten's Blog
December 31, 2008
The film of the script of the book.
Anyone who ever saw the movies of Norman Mailer might conclude that novelists should never personally adapt their books for the big screen, and under no circumstances should they ever, ever, accept the director’s chair. Such a delusional ego-trip might pay some short-term writer’s bills but the artistic plane won’t ever leave the runway. The sheer freight of verbiage, interior narration, absence of action and lack of technical grasp of how the capture then juxtaposition of images can make a viewer’s heart skip a beat will turn an otherwise spritely novel into the filmic equivalent of Howard Hughes’ Spruce Goose. Rather – or so the orthodoxy holds – a fresh eye should be bought in, so that the story can be freshly re-imagined, given new life, visual movement, levity, and competence.
It was that with great foolishness and no small trepidation therefore that I recently put my name forward not only to adapt but also to direct for the cinema a new novel of mine, ten years after my first fledgling effort to complete the same tricky trifecta.
I was emboldened by a single presumption: that these three different disciplines are actually only variants of each other. By this I mean that the writer of novels directs the action in a scene just as meticulously, and just as visually, as a director, while the film director, by the injection of his or her ideas, is also rewriting the scene and is thereby partly a novelist. If it’s all the same game, then, the challenge is not one of mastering different art forms, but merely becoming competent with very different tools.
Get more on Anthony McCarten at SimonandSchuster.com
It was that with great foolishness and no small trepidation therefore that I recently put my name forward not only to adapt but also to direct for the cinema a new novel of mine, ten years after my first fledgling effort to complete the same tricky trifecta.
I was emboldened by a single presumption: that these three different disciplines are actually only variants of each other. By this I mean that the writer of novels directs the action in a scene just as meticulously, and just as visually, as a director, while the film director, by the injection of his or her ideas, is also rewriting the scene and is thereby partly a novelist. If it’s all the same game, then, the challenge is not one of mastering different art forms, but merely becoming competent with very different tools.
Get more on Anthony McCarten at SimonandSchuster.com
