Adaptation has always been an important source of film and television scripts, both before and in the current era of IP adaptation film and television popularity. Adapting a screenplay has some methods that are different from the original screenplay, and today we will talk about how to create an adapted screenplay.
Film and television adaptation is a technical job, it means moving from one medium to another. Adaptation is defined as adapting it to the new medium by making some kind of change in structure, function, and form. How do you adapt material from other media into a screenplay? Of course, there are many ways, when you change a novel, a play, or a character's life into a script, you have to think like you are creating an original script, and don't expect it to work by moving the novel into the script word for word.
Coppola learned a lesson in her adaptation of The Great Gatsby. Coppola is the author of many outstanding films such as The Godfather and Apocalypse Now, and is one of Hollywood's richest creative powerhouses. But he was completely faithful to the novel when he wrote the screenplay for The Great Gatsby, and the result was weak visual and dramatic, and it didn't work at all.
The dramatic actions and narrative threads of the novel story are often told through the perspective of the main characters, and the audience can directly understand their thoughts, feelings, memories, hopes and fears. There's also dialogue and narration, which takes place in dramatic situations, and the movie, if you want to use it well, you have to have action.
Each screenwriter adapts a different technique. The approach of Oscar-winning screenwriter Alvin Sargent, who wrote plays such as "The Ordinary Man", "Spider-Man 2", "Julia", "Paper Moon" and so on, is to turn the material into his "own thing" and become "his story" after reading a lot of the original material over and over again, and then write them into different scenes, spread the manuscript on the ground, and then find a way to pull out a story line from these scattered scenes.
Sargent won the Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay for "The Ordinary Man" and "Julia," and his Paper Moon was nominated for Best Adapted Screenplay
Oscar-winning Oscar winner Ted Tully, screenwriter of "The Silence of the Lambs" and "Jurors," said he was "tearing books apart one by one." I'm trying to build a structural thread of an event, one event happening, and then one after another, and what moves you the most, that's the most important thing in this book. So I put these scenes in a card, pulled out the story from it, and found what the adaptation needed the most attention to. ”
Ted Tully won the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay for The Silence of the Lambs
The first thing Tully has to do is decide who the story is about, and those things don't help shape the main characters and need to be thrown away. When you change a novel into a 2-hour movie script, you have to do it both well and maintain the integrity of the original material. It is a principle to adapt a book or an article to the needs of the script. You have to move, cut, or add scenes so that you can follow the main line of the story.
Tully said: "The last thing you have to think about is to innovate according to its own logic, and if there is no problem, don't keep thinking about correcting it." This means that if the scene works in the context of the script, don't change it lightly, and if you can't use the scene in the book, you have to create a scene that works in the visual representation of the film rather than in the literary sense."
The core of the adaptation is to find a balance between the characters and the situation while maintaining the integrity of the story.
Brian Helgrand, the screenwriter of "Mysterious River," also faced this challenge when adapting the film. He read the book first, "When I came across a scene, I read it two or three times in a row, made a lot of marks on the book, and marked the events and wrote them in the header. I crossed out the unwanted parts, and finally I tore the pages I wanted together, and once I found the core content they were trying to express, I typed out an outline, and then added the scenes in, combined several scenes, and let the events work. ”
Helgaland was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay for Mystic River, los Angeles Confidential or the Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay, and so was he
"Part of the technique of adaptation is to find an effective way to objectify the inner monologue of the original book. Sometimes the inner thoughts of the bar are changed to dialogue. ”
This is often one of the most common challenges a writer has when exposed to adaptation. Stuart Beatty, the screenwriter of "Killing with a Knife", has adapted the screenplay for the film based on the novel "Deviant Pursuit". "It's a thriller about an ordinary man who has an affair and his wife is completely out of control because of a momentary vulnerability, both morally and Hitchcock-like, and the dilemma that every ordinary person faces in extreme situations. The characters have been trying to break free from the situation, but the result is getting deeper and deeper. ”
Poster for the film "Killing with a Knife"
Talking about how to adapt the work, Beatty said: "The first time I really read the novel with a trembling half ass sitting in a chair. It's a 400-page book, and I know 300 pages can be written into a great movie, with 180 layers of plots intertwined, and you know it's a completely unnatural adaptation, and you want to put these things into an unexpected plot line to the end. ”
"I had to give up the third part of the book. The drama is all in the family. The girl has a type of diabetes, and his parents save money to buy a new medicine that saves her life. She also had to rely on another mortgage payment to protect her daily life-sustaining dialysis machine treatment. They are all under a lot of pressure, and each of them is caught up in a dilemma. It was a very uncomfortable situation. In this way, the background of the husband's infidelity was constructed. This is a basic build. ”
Stills from the film "Derailed Pursuit"
Beatty read it two or three times and then started writing the script, and he thought it was important to read through the first time because that's how you get in touch with the work. "I'm going to write down good scenes, good clues, good moments, and places that might be like open scenes where you can put things in — scenes that can be filled in but don't know what can happen yet." Then you have to organize these things and make them cinematic. ”
"After reading the book two or three times, I didn't write a specific outline, but just made a two- or three-page note, like 'scene in the car', 'scene in the elevator', 'scene in the room', 'doctor's scene' and so on. For a script, I usually write an outline of about 10 pages, usually I try to compress it to a length of 5 pages, so that the first act is on the first page, the third act is on the 5 page... This is my approach. ”
Poster of Cold Mountain
When you're dealing with an adaptation of a historical theme, that's another challenge. For example, Cold Mountain, which won the National Book Award, tells the story of two lovers who were physically and mentally saved in the late Civil War. Screenwriter Anthony Mingla cuts from a potential theme of a journey home to the adaptation. His play has a main character, a dramatic and emotional journey, a dramatic goal, a series of obstacles, a woman who waits with hope and patience, and inman's spiritual dwelling place called "Cold Mountain."
Anthony Minggra (right) was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay for Genius Ripley and The English Patient
At a time when brothers are divided and lovers are torn apart, "Cold Mountain" becomes a symbol of "love" and the spiritual homeland that people insist on. It represents not only the arduous physical journey of the rebel warrior Inman, but also his spiritual journey. The whole story is about leaving the battlefield and returning from the war and the cruelty and chaos that the war brought to the world.
Minggra left the original book, compressed and abridged, and only preserved the obstacles encountered in the journey as they were. In the novel, Inman endures the test of his loyalty and heroism, and finally returns home, "Cold Mountain", and gains love.
A lot of times when you're adapting, you have to add new characters, remove other characters, create some new turning points of events, and probably the overall structure is very different from the original book. In The English Patient, for example, the entire film is based on only a few passages from the novel, and in Julia, the writers create a complete film based on a short passage from Lillian Heilman's memoir, Repentance.
Adapting a stage play into a film script should also be treated in the same way, although you are involved in different forms, but following the same principles.
"Twelve Angry Men", "Desire StreetCar", and "Death of a Salesman" are all film adaptations of the same name
Biographical plays deal with people. If you want to adapt a person's life into a script, you must have some choice and focus to be effective. If you want to write a biographical script, the lives of the characters you want to write about are just the starting point. For example, Peter Schaeffer's Biography of Mozart deals with only a few fragments of Mozart's life and his relationship with Salerry, and cleverly chooses the perspective of Salierry, a court musician who is jealous of Mozart's musical genius, to present the story.
Mozart is also a film adaptation of a stage play that won the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay
Choose a small number of events in your character's lives and put them into a dramatic storyline, and Lawrence of Arabia and Kung Ming Kane are good examples.
What is the best art adaptation? Don't get too attached to the original. Books are books, plays are plays, articles are articles, and scripts are plays. No matter what medium you're adapting from, essentially you're still working on an original screenplay, so you have to explore it in an original way.
Industry hot spots, screenwriter dry goods, high-quality screenwriters and project promotion, please pay attention to the screenwriter catcher!
Welcome like-minded partners to discuss cooperation!