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I've just finished reading The Cider House Rules. It's taken me a while, partially because it's about 750 pages and partially because I've only been reading it on the train home in the evening. I've seen the film twice, and rather fell in love with its bleak beauty and its themes of belonging and duty, so when I got some book vouchers I immediately decided that this would be a good time to get around to reading a John Irvine novel.
To put it mildly I was amazed by how much there is in the book that isn't in the novel. Now, obviously, the film is only about 126 minutes long, which gives about 6 pages per minute of screentime - not really a reasonable pace for an adaptation, so obviously something was going to have to go. Indeed, we lose an awful lot of backstory (like the whole history of Dr Larch and the town of St Cloud's), several characters (including at least two major ones) and about fifteen years of time.
Interestingly the book was adapted by its writer, and it made me wonder about adaptations. I could see three or four different ways of adapting the book into a film, and I wanted to know why he'd chosen to do it the way he did. Was he trying to take the main points he wanted to get across, or his favourite scenes, or what he thought made the best film or was there something else he was going for?
And then I had an interesting idea, could you take a book like The Cider House Rules, winding and dense enough to support multiple interpretations and stories, and make multiple versions of it. As much as possible keep the same sets and actors, but let different people tell the bits of story they wanted to, the way they wanted to, and see how different visions see the same thing. Of course, this happens with remakes all the time, but they're always versions of the previous film, not different takes on a non-visual story.
In some ways, this is what Hal Hartley did with Flirt, where he tells three versions of the same story, but in very different ways. That's a fantastic film, but more from an intellectual viewpoint than anything else, as it shows how the same story has different emotional effects purely based on the style of the presentation. It's not quite what my experiment would look like, but it's still well worth a look.
To put it mildly I was amazed by how much there is in the book that isn't in the novel. Now, obviously, the film is only about 126 minutes long, which gives about 6 pages per minute of screentime - not really a reasonable pace for an adaptation, so obviously something was going to have to go. Indeed, we lose an awful lot of backstory (like the whole history of Dr Larch and the town of St Cloud's), several characters (including at least two major ones) and about fifteen years of time.
Interestingly the book was adapted by its writer, and it made me wonder about adaptations. I could see three or four different ways of adapting the book into a film, and I wanted to know why he'd chosen to do it the way he did. Was he trying to take the main points he wanted to get across, or his favourite scenes, or what he thought made the best film or was there something else he was going for?
And then I had an interesting idea, could you take a book like The Cider House Rules, winding and dense enough to support multiple interpretations and stories, and make multiple versions of it. As much as possible keep the same sets and actors, but let different people tell the bits of story they wanted to, the way they wanted to, and see how different visions see the same thing. Of course, this happens with remakes all the time, but they're always versions of the previous film, not different takes on a non-visual story.
In some ways, this is what Hal Hartley did with Flirt, where he tells three versions of the same story, but in very different ways. That's a fantastic film, but more from an intellectual viewpoint than anything else, as it shows how the same story has different emotional effects purely based on the style of the presentation. It's not quite what my experiment would look like, but it's still well worth a look.
