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Christabelle Dilks, lecturer in screenwriting and filmmaking, provides her expert advice on how to adapt works for film and television. She explores pacing and characters, and recommends some of her favourite adapted works.
What should you focus on when adapting books to film?
‘This would make a great movie!’ you exclaim, putting down a book you’ve loved. You can see it now: the panoramic landscapes, the dramatic scenes, characters so real they’re striding around the room. But before you start casting your favourite actors, pause a moment. Does this book really have what it takes to successfully translate to the screen?
Economy is key. Whether your starting point is a labyrinthine eighteenth-century novel, or a real event assembled from historical records and diaries, you won’t be able to tell the whole story. Films and TV dramas unfold over a strictly limited time-frame – quite apart from being incredibly expensive to produce. Unlike a novel, a film is designed to be consumed in a single sitting. Even in long-form TV drama, enjoyed at your leisure, each episode is tightly constructed to be compelling from start to finish. A novel might feel like a meander through a forest, but a script is more like a roller-coaster: a prescribed ride of escalating tension towards the climax.
There are really no formulae for writing great scripts, but the conventions of movies (at least in the west) have instilled in us certain expectations. Aristotle’s unities of time and place, for example, still hold: a screenplay works best if the story unfolds in a single location over a limited story timeline. Each scene must contain dramatic conflict, and be causally related to the last.
You do need some kind of resolution, even if that’s your character’s failure, or partial failure, to get what they want. For in the ending of a screen story lies its meaning.
In adapting sprawling novels, the job of the screenwriter is to make a fairly ruthless selection of events in order to create a particular narrative arc. To do this, you should know what you want your story to say. By slicing a path through the morass of happenings and impressions, you’ll carve out a story with a beginning, middle and end. The following recipe varies from genre to genre, but the ingredients can be distilled to a few essentials.
First, you need a set-up, an opening which establishes: what the story is about; who it is about; what they want; and why we should care. This is the job of act one. The second act, and the longest, classically charts the protagonist’s attempts to achieve a goal of some sort, and – naturally – failing. Act three brings the final climax and resolution. And you do need some kind of resolution, even if that’s your character’s failure, or partial failure, to get what they want. For in the ending of a screen story lies its meaning.
How can you tailor characters and dialogue for the screen?
All this plotting is meaningless, of course, without character. The immersive nature of film pulls the viewer in so that we experience the story from the inside, through the main character, who becomes a kind of avatar for ourselves. By identifying with the protagonist we experience the story from inside it. Even great historical events – wars, disasters, coups – are dull unless we live them through the eyes of a compelling character. And our main character – whether likeable or not – only becomes compelling when they try to get something they need.
While in genre movies – thrillers, mysteries, romances – the protagonist’s goal will be something external (catch the killer, get the girl), in adapting subtler works the character might want something more internal. The interiority we take for granted in literature is, inevitably, problematic for screenwriters. You can’t write, ‘sixty years of pain and regret are etched on his face,’ because no actor could ever portray that! Instead, our job as screenwriters is to imply those feelings through the character’s actions. This is why ‘show, don’t tell’ is so powerful for screenwriters.
Ultimately, the protagonist’s journey really becomes the plot in drama, and the golden rule is: we need to care. It has to matter to the audience if your protagonist achieves their goal or not. This is called stakes, and it’s perhaps the most essential element of screenwriting.
What TV or film adaptations would you recommend and why?
Unsurprisingly, adaptations form a large proportion of Oscar and BAFTA contenders. Film financiers and TV execs are naturally drawn to published novels since they bring a built-in following. Les Miserables and Hunger Games naturally drew huge crowds, and on TV, Game of Thrones, Normal People, and One Day all garnered handsome budgets.
However, cautionary tales abound. It’s easy to think of examples where successful novels have not translated satisfyingly to films. The Great Gatsby, Girl on a Train and On Chesil Beach all spring to mind, but you’ll doubtless have more. Fidelity to the original is almost impossible, since reading any novel involves us in a personal act of adaptation, and no film will render a favourite book in just the way you see it. But perhaps fidelity is not the main criterion here. Charlie Kaufman’s brilliant meta-movie Adaptation, adapted from Susan Orlean’s book The Orchid Thief, is a wonderful exploration of just this problem. Orlean was averse to the film but later said of it, ‘What I admire the most is that it's very true to the book's themes of life and obsession.’ The film must have its own separate identity, and focussing on the poetic spirit of the original is key to unlocking that.
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After working as an actor at the National Theatre and West End, Christabelle trained as a director and had a long career in film development and television drama. As a Commissioning Editor at Channel 4, she worked on Queer as Folk, Longitude, and Shackleton, and at the BBC she story-produced and script-edited many series and singles including The Inspector Lynley Mysteries, Ancient Rome: The Rise and Fall of an Empire, Casualty 1906, Krakatoa: Volcano of Destruction and The Sinking of the Lusitania. Christabelle has scripted factual dramas about Prince Albert and Anthony Eden as well as her own original screenplays. She currently teaches screenwriting and filmmaking to both undergraduates and MA students at UEA.
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