JOIN USThe process of translating a thousand words into stage or screen may sound like a simple process to lay watchers, but seeing their work go through the transformation has a different feel on writers.
A novel is a different universe, said Richard Flanagan, who rewrote the screenplay of The Sound of One Hand Clapping into a novel after failing to sell it.
He said it took three years to write the screenplay and a further three to convert it into a novel, by which time he could sell the original script.
Flanagan was talking on the session 'Adaptations' with Lionel Shriver, Vishal Bhardwaj, and Tom Stoppard, which was chaired by GirishKarnad.
Lionel Shriver said her novel We need to Talk about Kevin had been ‘adapted’, but she had no experience of doing adaptation herself.
She said the early versions of the script had horrified her because ‘it seemed so thin’ but the director’s visual imagery and the actors’ interpretation that brought it alive: “for me it was an education in a whole other language, a non-language language.”
She said that the film version had made her “appreciate” her own medium more.
Speaking rather amusingly of his Bollywood adaptation of Macbeth, Indian screenwriter and director Vishal Bhardwaj said he decided cops would make better witches. In the film Maqbool, he said it was better to make Lady Macbeth a mistress to intensify her lust to be with her lover more than the obsession for power.
British playwright Tom Stoppard observed that he has adapted novels into films and television, as well as ‘translated’ foreign plays into English.
He realised when he thought about it that ‘I seemed to have had more life as an adaptor than as a playwright. It’s not usually the way I look at myself.’
He said that if he adapted his play Arcadia, he would have to leave at least half out, since the play itself was so long. Shriver joked that in her experience, ‘it makes you worried because you realise you didn’t need that other half.’
Flanagan observed that ‘films are not so much about words, they are a fusion of image and sound,’ and talked of the constricting tyranny of financial demands in the film industry.
Stoppard quipped that ‘film is the process of turning money into light, and then back into money.’ Shriver said novelists have no control over the film process itself, which meant ‘if it sucked, it wasn’t my fault.’
Mediator Girish Karnad observed that ‘the novel doesn’t have the same status in Indian society,’ saying that the relationship between the novel and cinema does not really exist in India in the way it does in the Western tradition, and that India was much more a culture of film, with over 1000 movies made every year.