I’ve seen this phrase a lot since “Cloud Atlas” came out. Haven’t seen it yet, so can’t comment there. Since the advent of CGI, al lot of unfilmable books have been filmed (Lord of the Rings) but in the Cloud Atlas case it’s the structure as much as the shifting content that was seen as a problem.
Now, I see previews for “Life of Pi”. I really, really liked that book & to me it is unfilmable. The reasons would be spoilers for the book, but we could go into that if anyone’s interested. I’m just so disheartened by that preview - & not just because the lead character sounds like Raj on Big Bang Theory.
Any thoughts on this book as unfilmable, or other books you think are unfilmable?
There are plenty of non-fiction books that are unfilmable (except in a “Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex* But Were Afraid to Ask” sense). Like the Oxford English Dictionary (“the zebra did it!”).
The first book that came to mind was Codex Seraphinianus, but you probably could make an animated movie about it that would be similar in spirit, if not exactly in content.
I too hope the Pi preview* is misleading (after all, the “Lincoln” previews look deadly dull to me & it’s getting great reviews; same with “The Master”). I may just stick with the book.
Some interesting ‘unfilmable’ ones have been named.
*when did ‘previews’ start to be called ‘trailers’ , anyway?
I still hold that Dune and Watchmen are unfilmable, even though movies have been made based on them.
Other examples would be The Fan by Bob Randall or The Anderson Tapes by Lawrence Sanders. Both had relatively ordinary plots (The Fan was about a stalker and The Anderson Tapes was about an apartment building burglary). What was interesting about them were how they were told - The Fan was written completely as a series of letters and The Anderson Tapes was written as a series of transcripts of hidden surveillance recordings. Both methods created an interesting means of limiting the narrative.
But when they were turned into movies, these methods were abandoned and the plots were told as regular movies. Which lost the point that made the books interesting. The movies were reduced down to their fairly pedestrian stories.
Years later, Adam Rifkin made a movie Look (later expanded into a television series) which was composed of supposed footage from surveillance cameras. It would have been interesting if Sidney Lumet had tried this in his adaptation of The Anderson Tapes.
I think it would be impossible to do it justice as a movie, but I could see a TV miniseries taking a crack at it. (That’s an artistic opinion; don’t know if anyone is doing TV miniserieses anymore, or if a television production would be daring enough to tackle the book’s structural issues.)
I’ve never been satisfied with attempts to film fantasy stories which included a lot of psychic/mental trances/extraplanar visions, so I had assumed it would be a while if ever before we saw any serious, quality treatment for Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Darkover novels.
I would love to be proven wrong, particularly since they nudged up against the boundaries of this with LOTR and the X-Men movies, but I don’t think we’re really there yet.