There were times in 'Adaptation' during the editing where I really thought, 'Okay, well, this was a noble failure. I tried to do something good, but this is not going to work.'
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
I increasingly fear that nothing good can come of almost any adaptation, and obviously that's sweeping. There are a couple of adaptations that are perhaps as good or better than the original work. But the vast majority of them are pointless.
The issue of doing an adaptation of a book is the theater of the mind, and so you always face that.
If you write an original, it's like you went in and dug a well, and you hit oil. But an adaptation, it's like the oil well's on fire, and they bring you in to put the fire out and get it working again - or something like that.
The problem with books, now that I've written one, is that the idea of adaptation is so much easier than sitting down to write something new.
Adaptation seems to be, to a substantial extent, a process of reallocating your attention.
A film adaptation is, I hope, the director's version. A new creation.
Adapting a novel is not really about being faithful to every word and every moment the author has created. It's more about that same story being filtered through somebody else's sensibility.
To adapt a play into a movie, you have to change it.
It's like you take these great actors and put them in an aquarium of life and just watch them swim. That's what makes editing tough because you get all these beautiful, unplanned moments.
'The New Yorker' was really my first experience with serious editing. Previously, I'd more or less just had copyediting with a few suggestions - not much.
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