Not Strictly By the Book: Some of the most interesting book-to-film adaptations

Films can be adapted from a number of original, often unexpected sources. Sean Penn’s 1991 film The Indian Runner was in fact based on a Bruce Springsteen song. This is an under-explored form of adaptation, and it’s about time someone makes a film version of John Denver’s Please, Daddy, Don’t Get Drunk This Christmas (do Mel Gibson’s kids want to make a movie?).

The stage-to-film route is also a solid option, giving us such delights as A Streetcar Named Desire, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, and uh… My Big Fat Greek Wedding. Toy-to-film is happening with more regularity, offering us the essential opportunity to assess just who’s the better actor – Mark Wahlberg or a CGI Transformer?

However, most adaptations are of the book-to-film variety, taking literary prose and condensing it into a narrative that can be contained within an acceptable running time, ideally adding an entirely new dimension to the source material. It’s with this subjective benchmark in mind that we’re going to take a look at some of the most interesting book-to-film adaptations from semi-recent years. The books themselves are worthy of your time in their own right, but these are films that very much need to be added to your collection.

Blade Runner (1982)

Please accept YouTube cookies to play this video. By accepting you will be accessing content from YouTube, a service provided by an external third party.

YouTube privacy policy

If you accept this notice, your choice will be saved and the page will refresh.

The replicant hunters in Philip K. Dick’s 1968 novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? were never actually called Blade Runners. That term originated in a 1974 novel by Alan E. Nourse (called The Blade Runner, unsurprisingly), and director Ridley Scott simply liked how it sounded, so now we have a classic sci-fi film called Blade Runner.

Scott’s film uses Dick’s sparse writing as a framework, expanding on the grand ideas of what it means to be alive and arranging them into a tight, deliberately bleak package. The complexity of Dick’s themes aren’t dumbed down, nor does the film become bogged down in any philosophical musings about the nature of what it means to be alive. But this is the multilayered genius of the story, allowing it to be read as an allegory for the cost of infringement of technology into humanity, or just as an awesome film where Harrison Ford is in two minds about whether he should be killing (artificial) people.

Buy It:

UK: Check prices

USA: Check prices

Canada: Check prices

The Shining (1980)

Please accept YouTube cookies to play this video. By accepting you will be accessing content from YouTube, a service provided by an external third party.

YouTube privacy policy

If you accept this notice, your choice will be saved and the page will refresh.

Stephen King famously hated Stanley Kubrick’s adaptation of his 1977 novel so much that he wrote and produced his own 1997 miniseries adaptation with Steven Weber (best known for the sitcom Wings) standing in for Jack Nicholson.

Perhaps the most interesting adaptations come from cinematic auteurs who interpret an author’s work, rather than adapt it in a straightforward manner, recognising elements that should be strategically exploited for the purpose of making the most effective version of the story in movie form. And Kubrick’s interpretation was nothing if not effective.

It’s not as though the themes present in King’s novel have been amputated from the film, although Kubrick (and co-screenwriter Diane Johnson) altered the psychology and personality of the characters to amplify certain traits and guide outcomes, which kind of makes sense when you’re trying to adapt a 447-page novel into around two hours of film.

Both King and Kubrick’s versions of the story work, but they work in distinguishably different ways, and isn’t this the joy of a truly good book-to-film adaptation? Mike Flanagan’s sequel wasn’t bad either.

Buy It:

UK: Check prices

USA: Check prices

Canada: Check prices

The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999)

Please accept YouTube cookies to play this video. By accepting you will be accessing content from YouTube, a service provided by an external third party.

YouTube privacy policy

If you accept this notice, your choice will be saved and the page will refresh.

The late Anthony Minghella adapted Patricia Highsmith’s 1955 novel, delivering an elegant chocolate box of a movie, although there’s a deliciously sinister taste to its contents.

Choosing not to deviate too much from Highsmith’s arch, calculating prose, the only real tinkering Minghella has performed was the addition of a new character, Meredith Logue (Cate Blanchett), as a means of adding urgency to Tom Ripley’s (Matt Damon) concerns that his sociopathy and identity theft (and in turn, his true self) will be uncovered. Minghella’s screenplay sticks to the fundamentals of the story, and while there’s nothing revolutionary about the adaptation, its solidness and faithfulness result in a film that satisfyingly meets an audience’s expectations, without expecting too much in return.

Buy It:

UK: Check prices

USA: Check prices

Canada: Check prices

Adaptation (2002)

Please accept YouTube cookies to play this video. By accepting you will be accessing content from YouTube, a service provided by an external third party.

YouTube privacy policy

If you accept this notice, your choice will be saved and the page will refresh.

If you ask Charlie Kaufman to adapt a book into a screenplay to be directed by Spike Jonze, Adaptation is pretty much what you would expect to happen. Yes, it’s technically based upon a nonfiction book (The Orchid Thief by Susan Orlean), but instead of an adaptation, Kaufman instead wrote… uh… Adaptation.

Kaufman wrote a screenplay based upon his struggles to adapt the book, inserting himself (and his fictional identical twin brother) into the story, both played by Nicolas Cage, wearing a fat suit and a hairpiece that makes it look like a small, depressed dog has committed suicide on his scalp. The book’s writer Susan Orlean also features (as played by Meryl Streep), as well as the book’s real-life subject John Laroche, (courtesy of an Oscar-winning performance from Chris Cooper).

The structured absurdity of Kaufman’s screenplay is a sublime example of just how far not following instructions can take you, and if you don’t already own this film, you need to. They should have gotten Kaufman to adapt 50 Shades of Grey.

Buy It:

UK: Check prices

USA: Check prices

Canada: Check prices

Starship Troopers (1997)

Please accept YouTube cookies to play this video. By accepting you will be accessing content from YouTube, a service provided by an external third party.

YouTube privacy policy

If you accept this notice, your choice will be saved and the page will refresh.

Paul Verhoeven’s film version of Robert A. Heinlen’s 1959 novel must be called an adaptation, since the Writers Guild of America doesn’t permit “inspired by, a satire of, and sharing the same title” as an official credit. But the very fact that the film is almost unrecognisable from its source material while still playing with the very same themes explicitly set out in Heinlen’s writing is an unusual achievement.

A seemingly utopian future where American-accented Argentinians do their part to defend the planet (and the species) from murderous alien bugs while shiny propaganda is flung around indiscriminately isn’t meant to be taken at face value. In fact, taking the film seriously entirely misses the point.

Verhoeven’s masterful film is yet another example of an underrated director who takes a playful approach to darkness, uncomfortably inviting us to take joy from what should be horrifying. However, it’s perhaps Starship Troopers that was responsible for one of the worst examples of miscasting in modern cinema. Since audiences (apparently) accepted Denise Richards playing a starship pilot in the film, this might have led to her being cast as a nuclear physicist in 1999’s 007 instalment The World Is Not Enough. The irony was not lost on Richards during a cameo appearance (as herself) in the sitcom 30 Rock, where she informed people that she once “played a nuclear psychiatrist in a James Bonk movie.”