An open book: how make a great film adaptation, from The Shining to Trainspotting

It is always fun to join in a craze, like a Victorian going mad for penny farthings. Which is probably why, against my better judgment, I went to see Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster The Odyssey this summer, buying my ticket into the popular conversation along with everyone else. This year’s other divisive adaptation, Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights, had the world and his wife arguing about it before they had even watched the film. No doubt the makers of the recent Sense and Sensibility movie were also hoping for lots of people to go and see it to discover whether they hated it.

After all, very few of us leave the cinema saying: “That’s exactly how I pictured it in my head.” Or even less likely: “That was better than the book.” We’re more likely to shake our fists at how they ruined the ending, dumbed it down, unforgivably cast somebody with the wrong hair, or betrayed a beloved character, as with last year’s Thursday Murder Club debacle.

But what makes a good adaptation? Like Odysseus himself, and as every Nancy Meyers fan knows: it’s complicated. I have just written a book about the towering heights and profane depths of adaptation, The Book Was Better, for which I subjected myself to some of the worst viewing experiences possible, including the soft rock opera musical Heathcliff; 1996’s freakishly bad The Island of Dr Moreau; and a horrible three-part version of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged. But I also saw plenty of masterpieces that equalled or sometimes surpassed the originals. Here’s what I learned.

All aboard … Trainspotting. Photograph: AJ Pics/Alamy

The first thing to say is that the quality of the source is irrelevant. I went into my research with some pretty fixed ideas: for instance, that “the brilliant adaptations are nearly always of fiction of the second or third class”, as Anthony Burgess wrote; that some works are “unfilmable”; that classics have more “room to breathe” on TV. Soon I realised none of these were true. Yes, sometimes workmanlike novels, such as the late 60s and early 70s triumvirate Jaws, The Godfather and The Exorcist, can be tuned to a level of genius on screen. But great books can make great films, too: Trainspotting, The Go-Between, The Leopard and Burgess’s own A Clockwork Orange are just a few examples. And sometimes, in the case of The Da Vinci Code and Fifty Shades of Grey, a deeply silly book becomes a deeply silly film.

It is true that certain books lend themselves to the screen more readily. Jane Austen’s immaculate plots of love impeded are templates that can be dressed up in the clothes of any age, like the computer template Cher Horowitz uses to plan her outfits at the start of Clueless – the ne plus ultra of free-handed adaptations. Austen’s novels contain the DNA of all romcoms, just as Robinson Crusoe is found in The Martian, the gothic novel in horror films, or A Christmas Carol in every single Christmas movie. Short stories, with their twisty shocks and rush towards the end point, seem made for cinema; my favourite film, Don’t Look Now, is based on a Daphne du Maurier novella. The murky origins and elasticity of myths and their close cousins, folk and fairytales, make them ceaselessly adaptable, because they leave gaps for a film-maker to fill with their own imaginations.

Being unfaithful is usually helpful. Some of the best adaptations flirt with the source material, taking frightful liberties and then abandoning it like a tabloid love rat. “Steal the parts that you need, and then run as fast as you can,” advised Paul Thomas Anderson; Hitchcock claimed he read The Birds once before making his version, and never thought about it again. (One screenwriter I spoke to told me he was once asked not to read the novel he was adapting as the production company thought it would be a hindrance). Books and films are entirely different beasts, “apples and giraffes”, as author-screenwriter Dennis Lehane once said. Adaptation is an act of translation from the verbal to the visual. A film-maker needs to find their own language.

You’ve come a long way, baby … Children of Men. Photograph: AJ Pics/Alamy

One of my most beloved unfaithful adaptations is Alfonso Cuarón’s 2006 Children of Men, and not just because it stars Clive Owen at the peak of his physical perfection. It manages to transform a cerebral, theological novel by the Conservative peer PD James into a dystopian thriller about populism, terror and how we treat immigrants, one which – although now two decades old – feels fresher each year. (James was delighted with it.) Cuarón used the novel as a jumping-off point, then left it behind to follow his own adventure. What remained was the central conceit: what if we lived in a world without children? The “what if” high concepts of science fiction and speculative fiction are perfect for playing fast and loose with: a vessel into which a film-maker’s own preoccupations, and the anxieties of their age, can be poured.

When writer-director Sally Potter reinvented Virginia Woolf’s time-travelling fantasia Orlando, she treated it “as if the book never existed”, turning it into a lavish nose-thumb to a UK establishment that had just passed section 28. She was, she said, cruel to the novel to be kind to the film. It’s the destruction-as-creation mantra. In the hands of the right writer and director, a source can, and should, be made to submit to their will: Stanley Kubrick betrayed Stephen King’s vision of The Shining but made a tour de force. Heart of Darkness mutated into a war epic with Apocalypse Now; Red Dragon became, well, a Michael Mann film, the hypnotic Manhunter. An adaptation should never be a hollow greatest hits album. Being too reverential towards a literary source can kill it, which is why I suspect films such as The Hunger Games and The Road, lovingly and stylishly made with few changes, felt slightly bloodless on screen to me.

Can anything really be faithful anyway, and to what? No story is 100 per cent original. (As Alien screenwriter Dan O’Bannon said: “I didn’t steal from anybody. I stole from everybody!”) I don’t even think you can be “true to the spirit” of a text, because the spirit is different for everyone. We all have our own little films running in our heads when we read. Many see The Great Gatsby as a death knell for the US; adapters tend to think: “parties!”. I think Heathcliff is a psychopath who likes to hang little dogs; successive directors clearly didn’t. I loved discovering that Jodie Foster lobbied hard for the part of Clarice Starling in The Silence of the Lambs because, for her, the novel was about a woman saving the life of another woman while “all these fucking men” get in the way. An adaptation may just be a glimpse into another mind’s eye, but their pictures seldom match the ones we had imagined.

Up to date … Renée Zellweger as Bridget Jones. Photograph: Working Title/Sportsphoto/Allstar

Perhaps the most obvious example of this is casting. As sure as night follows day, Hollywood casts a better-looking actor than strictly necessary, although not always reaching “Denise Richards in hotpants as a nuclear physicist in The World is Not Enough” levels. This can be deliberate: in Robert Bloch’s novel Psycho, Norman Bates is physically repellent; Hitchcock wanted the sweet-faced Anthony Perkins for the part to wrongfoot the audience. More often it’s because, as the critic Roger Ebert observed, cinema is a machine for generating empathy, so the thinking goes that leads should be “likable” – which backfired horribly when Bruce Willis was cast as a desiccated English journalist in the notoriously disastrous adaptation of Tom Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities. But sometimes an actor who is wrong on paper can make a role their own, whether it’s Margaret Rutherford as Miss Marple, Renée Zellweger as Bridget Jones or Michael Caine as Harry Palmer in The Ipcress File (in Len Deighton’s novels he’s a northerner and doesn’t have a name). Charisma goes a long way.

Perhaps in the end, adaptation all comes down to emotions and sensations. “You’ve drunk the drink, and the taste that’s left in your mouth is what you go with,” as Anthony Minghella described adapting The Talented Mr Ripley. Irvine Welsh said you must smell the books. Hossein Amini, who reinvented The Wings of the Dove as “noir in costume”, wanted to recapture that ecstatic moment when “nobody 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, subordinating it to his worldview and faithlessly reinventing it for our age by turning a wily trickster into a traumatised veteran, the film just made me feel as if I’d been in a war: long periods of boredom and waiting punctuated by violence. Perhaps, ultimately, he overthought it and should have felt it instead? Or maybe, as the late Hilary Mantel said of adaptation, you must “put down the text, and dream it”.

The Book Was Better by Louise Willder (Oneworld, £14.99). To order a copy for £13.49 go to guardianbookshop.com Delivery charges may apply.