Why people always say "The book was better" (novel, development)
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For years I couldn't understand why people are so insistent on claiming the book is better than the movie. I just figured it out, and I feel stupid now for not thinking of this sooner.
When you read a book you are creating a new world that is yours. The story is being told, but YOU are building a mental-movie of it as you read. So, when the movie version comes out and it's not the way YOU seen it, then automatically you are turned off by it.
Chances are the Director shot the movie in the way that he created it in his mind as he read the book.
Just something I have been fascinated with. Why do you think people tend to like the book better? Is my theory legit?
Movies cannot show the thoughts and feelings, the deeper dynamics of the characters without major narration.
Stories do get butchered to fit into a 110 minute time frame.
However, it is not always how the director sees the story. A director is going off a screenplay which is often written by someone else. So it is really the screenwriters vision first which then gets 'turned' even more by the directors vision, which again is influenced by the actors take on the nature of the character they are playing.
Only a very few movies have been as good as the book. Those are the ones that break out of the 'movie formula' - an example is Gone With the Wind. They did not stick to the typical feature timeframe. They used as much time as it took to properly tell the story.
One movie that bugged me because of its deviation from the book was The Black Stallion. The first half of the movie was beautiful and accurate to an extent. Though right from the start, there was a wrong. In the book, Alec was on the boat alone, in the movie he was traveling with his father. In the book, his father is a important character once Alec is home. So in the movie, once home, the dynamic is very different even though the story has all te same events.
Now, I can understand with the casting. Kelly Reno was much younger than the character. It would have not been realistic to have such a young boy traveling alone.
The only movie I thought was as good as the book was Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club.
If the book is really well written and an adaption to film is made, I cannot bear to see the film. I'm always afraid it will ruin my memory of the book. If the book is so-so, has poor character development or is a mystery/thriller, then I don't mind seeing the film.
One thing you have to realize is that people generally read books at a much slower/casual pace, whereas movies are meant to be watched all at once. As such screenplays often follow a very set narrative structure/formula, so books that have more free-roaming stories sometimes have to be radically changed in order to work as a coherent film.
Jurassic Park was a butchered version of the book but just as entertaining, IMO.
Gone with the Wind left massive things out and it was still great.
Princess Bride was WAY better as a movie, as was Fried Green Tomatoes (though I love the rest of Fanny Flagg's stuff) and several scifi and James Bond books. Forrest Gump is another book that was a snoozefest to me. But the movie was great.
The Help was unreadable to me (and the movie was boring as heck), but I got through the movie much better.
The first Harry Potter actually bored me because it was like revisiting a place that already existed in my head. I felt like they were almost too word-for-word...honestly, it speaks well of the movie's makers, because I literally had those scenes in my head before ever seeing that movie. Not to mention the characters were very well cast. But it was 3 hours of reading the book all over again and it kind of took away some of the excitement.
Hrm... take Tom Cruise in Jack Reacher. Yeah...No thank you, don't think so.
In Lee Child's series, the Jack Reacher we all knew was a 6'5 BIG guy. His physical presence was a key factor in everything the man did, and how people reacted to him in the stories. When reading the books, people imagined a large imposing figure. There are a lot of actors who could've carried this off, but not a Tom Cruise who plays Tiny Tom Cruise in every movie.
My husband saw the movie and actually did like it, but said it required his distancing himself from the books. And IMO, that's not fair to the fans of the books.
So, it's not that we just create a story and vision in our heads, it's also what the author created for us.
The film and the novel aren't really comparable. They are simple very different artistic mediums.
One is a medium of thought, of words, of descriptions; the other of sound and light.
Films that attempt to reproduce a novel tend to be less compelling than the novel because they novel was created on its own, while such films tend to try and take an inherently different medium and put it on the screen. Films work much better if they simply try and go back to the source material for the novel - which only be gleaned by 'triangulating', so to speak, the novel back to an imaginary origin (and their are endless such origins for any novel, not just one). A film works much better if it attempts to use a novel as a very broad source for telling a cinematic tale, not a literary tale, for the screen is cinematic, not literary.
Ultimately, saying that a book is better than a film (or vice versa) is as nonsensical as saying that Van Gogh's Sunflowers is better than Beethoven's Triple Concerto; they are simply incomparable by their natures. You might like one or the other better, in that it provides more pleasure than the other for you, but that is beside the point.
Books are not as often made from films, but when they are, they tend to suffer the same fate - they try and tell a cinematic story with words, rather than tell a literary story. Same problem, but the problem again is with the intent of the copying artist, not the medium itself.
People who enjoy a book, then go to the theater hoping to have their literary experience fulfilled on the big screen, deserve to be disappointed. If they go demanding fealty to the book, they similarly deserve disappointment. Such expectations are foolish.
I can think of quite a few movies that were better than the books.
THE GODFATHER. One of the greatest movies ever made. The book was ... meh.
JAWS. Another one of the greatest movies ever made. The book was downright bad.
BLADE RUNNER. My favorite movie. The novella on which it was based is blech.
FORREST GUMP. Movie is fun. The book is horrible. Really horrible.
JACKIE BROWN. I'm a big Elmore Leonard fan, but even I have to admit this movie was better than the book on which it was based.
PSYCHO. I liked the book. It's good. But we have to be honest. The movie is a classic work of genius.
PLANET OF THE APES. Book is okay at best. Movie is a classic.
Any of the BOURNE movie. The movies are fun. Robert Ludlum's prose actually hurts to read.
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