Adaptations

Very impressive to be adapting Oscar Wilde (who I have long enjoyed).

I used to be a bit more of a purist about adaptations but along the way I've seen wonderful adaptations that take a lot of liberty with the source material. Then I've seen both types of approaches fail terribly.

What my rule of thumb is, stay true to the soul of the project in your adaptation but that doesn't mean you have to muzzle your own creativity. If you can serve that story's core by taking some liberty with it to increase the conflict or impact of a subplot/character/scene for instance, I think that can be a valuable creative contribution to making the project more entertaining.

To me, the mistake is the opposite: either not recognizing or ignoring the soul of story undermines the purpose of adapting it and often becomes disappointing to an audience familiar with the story.

Completely agree that the key element is staying true to the heart of the source material. This said, I have recently seen some very bold adaptations that really turned the original story on its head. I thought every possible adaptation of The Wizard of Oz had been made until I watched Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass by David Wain and Ken Marino - it is remarkable how closely it follows the beats and characters of TWOZ while creating a whole new narrative set in current times in Hollywood.

I left the movie theatre feeling like I could be braver in my approach to adaptation, while still honouring and respecting the source material.

I’m a big Mike Flanagan fan, I had the pleasure of attending a WGA conversation he had last year around adaptation. I think his approach is super interesting. He takes a lot of creative freedom but his aim is to adapt the themes of the work through the sensations he had while reading the source material. He called it “symmetry in writing”. He also stressed not to worry too much about fans and hold on to what the source material means to you as the new writer. 

@luciar I haven't seen Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass but I am intrigued now and will seek it out. That's up my alley, when filmmakers serve the soul of a story with a new, creative direction that can broaden the theme.

One of my favorite approaches to that is the Coen brothers' very loose adaptation of Homer's Odyssey in O Brother Where Art Thou? And it has a secondary Easter Egg, the title is an homage to Preston Sturges' screwball comedy, Sullivan's Travels which has an Odyssey inspiration, about a comedy film director who wants to make his first serious film titled, O Brother Where Art Thou, about the suffering of the poor and homeless in America and the studio is freaked out. They try to convince him that it's career suicide and finally find the approach to deny him, what does he know about suffering? He's a rich, successful director. He can't help but agree then comes up with a brainstorm, he will disguise himself as a homeless person, live among them and learn first hand what suffering really is. And genuinely amusing and dramatic events follow as he goes on this Odyssey.

So in the Sturgis' hands, The Odyssey was adapted into a screwball comedy that wove in a powerful theme about poverty and hopelessness in America. And this was 1941. Hard to imagine Hollywood studios making a film like that today, especially the Ellison empire of Paramount and WB.