Hi there this is my first post on the forum.
I work in the film industry and I thought I could share some of my experience with you. I work in post production but I have worked for production companies in the past.
The first thing I can point out is why films are different from the books. It's not that filmmaker bastardize the books, it's just that we are talking about a different medium. A film is about what you see, a play is about what you say and a book is about what you think or feel while the action takes place. Therefore, anything that cannot be understood visually will be lost in the adaption to film. In a film, you cannot explain. Explaining something is called exposition and makes for a bad movie. If too much explanation is need then you are better off with the documentary format to tell your story. Sometime material doesn’t make it into the movie because film follows a precise 3 act structure where the main plot unfolds with a beginning, middle and end. This is generally true for books too but in book, it is not uncommon to introduce new and sometime major plot throughout the story. You can read a book while you are focused, when you lose interest, you put the book down a pick it up at a later time. You can’t do that with a film and the audience must stay focused throughout the film in order to enjoy it. That’s why the 3 act structure is used, because it is designed to sustain the attention of the audience. Then there is rhythm within the acts to alternate intense moments and moments where the audience can relax. If you pile on intense moments over intense moments like it is sometimes done in Hollywood, a more sophisticated audience will get tired and walk out of the theater or fall asleep.
I haven’t read the book yet but I can give an example with the first page where a character watches a butterfly on the beach while longing for an inner transformation similar to what the butterfly experiences. In a movie, we have a guy watching a butterfly on the beach. So we lost the deeper meaning. If you have your character explains that he longs for inner transformation then you have exposition. Big NO NO. But if our character experiences a spiritual transformation later on in the film, that’s when you bring back the butterfly again. Now the audience creates a link between transformation and the butterfly, the first scene now makes sense and the metaphor is not lost.
Someone talked about shooting scenes. It's important to point out that shooting scenes is a great exercise for aspiring filmmakers but it will not help to submit the scenes along with the screenplay. It will actually most likely hurt the project. The reasoning is that as good of a filmmaker one might be, without the budget to shoot high quality scenes, it will end up looking like a student film, which is fine but that's not really the image you want to project to a production company. You want to appear as professional as you can, even if you are faking it. I worked for a company that threw away without reading all submissions that came in with extra material like artwork or scenes. While this is not a general rule and some companies are more open minded, in my opinion it's better to focus on getting a strong script than to create extra material. The idea is if the company wants artwork, they will hire a professional artist, if the company wants to see scenes, they will hire professional filmmakers. If the company assumes you are a professional screenwriter, the only thing they want from you is a good script. If you try to do everything, you will most likely be branded as an “amateur”.
Shopping the book or shopping a screenplay? It is really hard to get anyone to read your screenplay in Hollywood. It is even harder to get them to read a book since there’s a lot more to read. They pay reader to read material so the bigger it is the more they pay for it to be read (in essence). So a screenplay is better because companies have most of the work done already, they just have to do a couple re-writes to get it to their liking. The problem then is that most the cost of writing the screenplay falls on the author of the book and not on the company, which is why they like it.
Well there is a lot more to say but I hope this helps for now.
Kavelian
