From Dune to The Lord Of The Rings and Orlando, cinema history is littered with books long considered ‘unfilmable’. We take a look at a few…
This article first appeared in Film Stories issue 42 in May 2023.
Anyone who has read Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life will likely have emerged from it bruised. Across 720 pages, Yanagihara succeeded in her aim of making it feel like a stultifying place that the reader “couldn’t get out of.” As unappetising as all this may seem, the book’s success illustrates that its themes (which include depression, addiction, sexuality, self-harm and suicide) resonated with many. This connection has led to continual interest in transforming it beyond the page.
That’s clearly quite some creative challenge, but Dutch stage director Ivo van Hove has taken it up. James Norton leads the cast in the current London stage version following van Hove’s previous Dutch language version – with a four-hour running time – that played in Amsterdam in 2018 (and briefly at the Edinburgh Film Festival last year). Rave reviews suggest that the obstacles of adapting the many interweaving plotlines for the stage appear to have been met, but it seems that bringing it to screen has raised rather more.
Yanaghira herself told the BBC she doubts that A Little Life could “exist” as a film. Whilst she considers that there are solutions for difficulties created by the text – such as using animation or CGI to depict scenes imagined in the book – she told The Guardian that screen adaptation scripts have been rejected by a range of studios, streamers and networks (Hulu commissioned four scripts but then declined to progress). Maybe it is destined to be one of those books considered ‘unfilmable.’
Defining the term ‘unfilmable’ isn’t easy, although there are generally three common considerations:
Technical: Can a story formed in the reader’s imagination ever be created on a screen?
Artistic: Some books are simply not seen as filmic; maybe they’re too abstract or complex to put into visuals.
Financial: The bill for bringing a book – especially one with labyrinthine plot lines and a cast of thousands – to screen could be uncommercial against likely box office returns.
Whilst this makes good sense, there are plenty of examples of books that may have failed all of these tests in principle yet nevertheless made it to the screen – sometimes with success.
Wandering the Streets of Dublin
If the road to A Little Life on screen looks plagued with potholes, so did that of James Joyce’s Ulysses. Across more than 700 pages of dense stream of consciousness narration, the book reflects a day in which nothing much happens. It’s as often cited as one of Ireland’s greatest pieces of literature as it is one of its toughest reads. Filming it would therefore surely be a foolhardy act – and yet it has made it to the screen not once but twice.
2003’s Bloom led on visuals, but in 1967 Joseph Strick’s Ulysses, starring Milo O’Shea, took a more literal stab by transferring most of its dialogue from page to screen. This bought the film some notoriety and problems – Strick withdrew it from Cannes after it had been censored without his knowledge; it was then banned in Ireland for over 30 years – but it won an Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay.
There was fulsome praise from some critics; however, others opined that, despite its use of so much of the book’s literal language, the film didn’t quite get into the spirit of the novel. This is a classic danger – providing specific images risks losing the unspecific essence of what readers take from words.
A vision too big?
Since authors’ imaginations are unlimited but filmmakers’ resources aren’t, the scale of some novels once almost precluded their translation to screen. However, the success of Peter Jackson’s Lord Of The Rings trilogy is just one example of that rule being broken. Technology (especially CGI) and big budgets have clearly both played significant roles in this sea change.
Dune is a good example. Money changed hands for the film rights to Frank Herbert’s 1965 novel just six years after it was published and it has since been filmed twice. Anyone attempting it had their work cut out from the off.
It’s fair to say that David Lynch’s 1984 version is considered a dud. Roger Ebert described it as an “incomprehensible ugly mess” and Lynch refuses to talk about it or to consider any special edition or Director’s Cut involvement. Reviewer Gene Siskel pointed out that some of its special effects were cheap, which was surprising on a $45m budget.
Denis Villeneuve’s 2021 version, however, was much better received. Its budget helped; even allowing for inflation, the $165m price tag would have better enabled the director to create planets and giant sandworms as well as securing an enormous cast. Though the film had its detractors, they were outnumbered. In his five-star Guardian review, Xan Brooks described it as “the missing link bridging the multiplex and the arthouse,” which is a significant and quite rare achievement. It’s widely thought that part of the 2021 Dune success was that Villeneuve focused on only part of Herbert’s novel, thereby removing some of the complexity of many interlinking stories. Later this year we will see what he does with part two.
One story from many
Jettisoning some of a novel’s plotlines to create a film focused on just one or two can often be a key to success. In 1981’s Ragtime, Milos Forman took on EL Doctorow’s novel depicting a huge array of both real-life historical figures and fictional characters to reflect a range of early 20th century US societal issues. Simply transferring all of these strands onto screen would have been very unwise. Sunday Times film critic Stephen Armstrong has praised Forman’s response in forming the view that “the key story and the point of the novel is the story of the piano player and racial injustice.” This then defined Forman’s drama across two and a half hours.
The sheer scale of some books can understandably scare off filmmakers. David Foster Wallace was renowned for a distinctive literary style and ambition big on invented words and abbreviations, many of which were used in footnotes. Infinite Jest is considered by many as one of his greatest works, but anyone with a camera intending to translate it to screen would first have to navigate its 1000 pages and almost 400 endnotes/footnotes. So far no one has.
In these days of franchises and endless prequels/sequels, it might be expected that there would be hunger for another sprawling epic fantasy to leap from page to screen. Robert Jordan’s Wheel Of Time might well be a candidate, but for the small matter of it running to 14 novels. Finding focus there might be a step too far.
The curse
John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy Of Dunces is one book that Hollywood has been keen to bring to the screen pretty much since it was published in the early ’80s, but 40 years later it seems unfilmable for quite different reasons.
Toole committed suicide in 1969, long before his book made its way into print. This initial tragedy was compounded by the death of John Belushi, who was about to play the role of the book’s (anti-)hero Ignatius J Reilly on screen in 1982. Stephen Fry – hardly a name you’d expect to pop up in such a Hollywood tale – was later brought in to write a screenplay for the next attempt, and later still both Chris Farley and John Goodman were linked to play the role. It never happened.
Next, Steven Soderbergh developed a script with Will Ferrell as Reilly, which went as far as a staged reading in 2004; after which – nothing. Eight years later, Zach Galifianakis was in line for the role which again went nowhere. Running in parallel to all of this has been an ever-changing drama of rights ownership involving Johnny Carson, Orion, Fox and an oil tycoon!
Ten years ago Soderbergh described the project as having “bad mojo on it”, so anyone thinking of backing a project looking to prove him wrong any time soon may want to take a second look.
Against all odds
If ever there was a book that looked as if it was forever going to defy attempts at a screen adaptation, it was Virginia Woolf’s Orlando. Published in 1928, it tells the story of a character who lives for four centuries without ageing and changes gender somewhere in the midst of interacting with a vast cast of characters representing key figures in English literature and history. Inspired by Woolf’s lover, Vita Sackville-West, the book seems more like material for an academic lecture than 90 minutes of on-screen entertainment.
However Sally Potter’s film starring Tilda Swinton (who else?) generated two Oscar nominations. The fact that critics both praised it (New York Times critic Vincent Canby suggested that the film “could well become a classic model for independent filmmakers who follow their own irrational muses”) and panned it (LA Times’ Kenneth Turn called it “hollow, smug and self-satisfied”) rather neatly sums up the perils of taking on the unfilmable challenge in the first place.
