I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again. A movie is not a novel; a movie is a short story.
Remember your high school definition of a short story: it can be read in one sitting. That’s a movie. A novel takes many sittings to finish. ANY movie based on a novel requires that the novel be emasculated to the level of a short story. And especially long and involved novels are even harder to try to cram into a single-serving movie. Hence Peter Jackson’s trilogies of both LOTR and The Hobbit.
There’s a movie made from Tristram Shandy whose whole theme is based around the unfilmability of the novel.
The Monster at the End of This Book: Starring Lovable, Furry Old Grover. (There is a video of it, but it is really just of the book being read out loud, in Grover’s voice, and showing the pages. If that counts then no book is unfilmable.)
It can’t be filmed because the whole concept depends on it being a book, with pages that the reader must turn.
Rendezvous With Rama- Well I don’t think it is literally unfilmable, but I do think it would be impossible to translate into a mass appeal film which it would need to be for the effects budget. The novel is simply not a typical plot, there is no villain or conflict at all, just exploring the bizarre and inexplicable alien ship. Maybe Tarkovsky or Kubrick could have done something.
H P Lovecraft’s stuff- So much of the “horror” in his stuff is based on the protagonists internal dialogue and mood I don’t think it can translate easily to film.
Twice, actually.
One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest was like that, but that didn’t stop them.
So the book is about teenagers playing tennis, which is a metaphor for global nuclear war?
In that book, global nuclear war is a metaphor for teenagers playing tennis.
To be more serious, it is a huge book, in size and scope. Much of it takes place at the Enfield Tennis Academy, or somehow revolves around the people who live there. The game the kids are playing (called “Eschaton”, which has a physical element unlike most rotisserie league holocaust games) is just one scene in the book, albeit an extremely memorable one. To see it brought to life is a treat, especially with such attention to detail; there is an E.T.A. logo on the bucket of tennis balls, even.
I did a little research on it, and the idea came from the singer, originally. He wrote the song after reading the book (although the song doesn’t really copy the book, there is a shoutout to IJ in the lyrics) and wanted to recreate the Eschaton scene in a video. After being turned down by a couple directors, he found Michale Schur; a massive fan of the book who (as Eutychus pointed out) has gone so far as to buy the film rights to it.
The first book I remember reading and noticing that it couldn’t be filmed was A Wind in the Door, the first sequel to A Wrinkle in Time. The entire climax of the plot takes place in a “world” specifically described as being impossible to see. Meg feels most of it.
I haven’t read it in a while, though, so maybe they could cheat it a bit, Fantastic Voyage style.
What does adapting a book to a movie entail, anyway?
Anything with an unreliable narrator would be difficult at best, because part of such a book is the contrast between what the narrator is describing and what’s actually happening. Fan’s Notes, Cuckoo’s Nest, and other unreliably narrated books have two stories: what’s actually going on, and the narration. Only giving one of those is a less than complete adaptation.
House of Leaves would be borderline unfilmable. This is somewhat ironic, since the bulk of the text is a scene-by-scene description of watching a movie.
You COULD just film that movie and release it as a “found footage” horror, but it’s a completely different work at that point.
I’ve heard that a good example of this is Stephen King’s “Gerald’s Game”, and considering that he is one of the most prolific books-turned-to-movie authors that there is, and that this one hasn’t been turned into a movie, is probably good evidence that it is in fact unfilmable. I guess if it were ever turned into a movie it would be pretty boring, as it is just a woman trapped to a bed the entire time… but I’ve never read the book.
Plenty of movies have unreliable narrators. The “main character turns out to be delusional” twist is so common that it’s a cliche, and there are a number of others where the narrators are shown to be either lying or mistaken about what really happened.
That said, every adaptation of a novel is a less than complete adaptation. As Tim R. Mortiss mentioned upthread, novels are long. Screenplays are short. Even adaptations that are pretty faithful to the source material have to cut things, and there have been plenty of adaptations that didn’t stick that closely to the source. Bram Stoker’s Dracula has been adapted for film any number of times, but aside from just cutting things for length I believe all of them drop major characters and/or make significant changes to the story. For instance, someone familiar with Dracula only through the movies might think that the Count meets his end when he’s either staked through the heart or exposed to sunlight, but in the novel one of the heroes slices his throat while the other stabs him in the heart with a knife. To my knowledge only the 1992 Francis Ford Coppola film includes this scene, but in that movie this doesn’t immediately kill Dracula – there’s still time for a final scene that’s totally unrelated to anything that happens in the novel.
A truly faithful adaptation of Dracula would be too long to work as a movie and probably pretty dull as well, but it would be strange to claim that Dracula is unfilmable given that it has in fact been filmed again and again.
I’m not familiar with this book, but the 1938 novel Johnny Got His Gun is about a severely injured soldier who’s confined to bed and unable to speak, see, or hear. This book was adapted into a fairly well-known movie in the 1970s.
A Scanner Darkly is a good movie imho.
I was going to also mention Gerald’s Game - sometime in the past decade we had a similar discussion and that was my choice then. The problem with the book is the female in the book is essentially tied up to a bed, naked, for the vast majority of the book. That’s certainly filmable, and could have been made in the 1970s perhaps, but what actress would sign up to do that now?
Did you ever see the TV show? Definitely would have been better with decent CGI. The Andalites were… not good.
Why couldn’t she be wearing a bra and panties for the film version? I’d never heard of this book before so maybe her nakedness is such an essential part of the plot that changing it would turn the story into something totally different, but looking at the description on Wikipedia this doesn’t seem to be the case.
Zen And the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.
Because She is having sex with the Eponymous Gerald when she becomes trapped. Like most people she is naked at the time.
Too late to edit.
Now that I think about it, you could change the timing somewhat and have her still partly clothed.
But it would still be virtually unwatchable. Partly because of the inner dialog that has been mentioned before for other stories. Without the inner dialog the film would be about 30 minutes long.