How to Adapt Anything Into Anything

The absolute best movie adaptation of one of Shakespeare's works is, bar none, no doubt, gainsay-me-and-I'll-smack-you-in-the-mouth certain, Akira Kurosawa's Ran.

I'm certain there will be some Branagh-sniffers out there who will whine about his Henry V or (god forbid) his Hamlet, but there are always mouth-breathing philistines in any debate, no matter how obvious the outcome. Don't get me wrong, I love me some Branagh, but everyone knows the list of Best Shakespeare Movies goes like this:

1) Ran
2) Throne of Blood
3) Olivier's Henry V
4) MacKellan's Richard III
5) Olivier's Richard III
6) Scotland, PA
7) West Side Story
8) 10 Things I Hate About You
9) Strange Brew (It's an adaptation of Hamlet -- look it up.)
10) Anything by Kenneth Branagh. Except Hamlet. Because that sucked.

Well, everybody knows that, of course. But what a lot of people don't get is why Ran is so freaking fantastic, so incredibly successful in capturing the essence of King Lear on film. Well, here's why:

Because the whole damn thing is in Japanese. And therefore doesn't contain a lick of Shakespeare's dialogue.

(This is known in some circles as the "Baz Luhrmann's Romeo + Juliet would have been an awesome silent movie" rule.)

The mistake most people make when adapting something from one medium to another is that they base the adaptation on the surface elements of the original work; the shiny-pretties that strike a casual reader/viewer/audience member as "cool". The problem is, what works in one medium seldom works in another.

Shakespeare is a prime example. As I noted in First Thing We Do, Let's Kill All the English Majors, blank verse works like gangbusters on stage. Don't know why, but it does. It soars, it flies, it takes off like a giant goddamn bird if you deliver it right. On screen? On the page? Blechy-blechitty-blech-blech. Utter crap.

Similarly, giant explosions (preferably with the hero and his sidekick jumping to safety in slow motion in front of them) work wonderfully on screen. On stage? On the page? Yeah, not so much.

Which is why Kurosawa's decision to jettison all the dialogue in King Lear was key to making his film so damn brilliant. He turns the daughters into sons! Regan and Goneril are one guy! There's a freaky buddhist nun that you're all, like, "What the fuck?" about, but by god, it's LEAR. It's more LEAR than any other LEAR has ever been. The essence of the play is there, in spades.

"That's right, bitches! Hundreds of color coded samurai! Giant burning castle! It's all in the first folio -- look it up!"

Watching Ran won't tell you a thing about how to stage Lear, or how to read a particular line in the play, but you will get what that play is about. You will get King Lear. And it's just a flat-out amazing movie.

So, for all those movie execs eying Green Lantern and World of Warcraft and salivating, I present the Three Steps To Adapting Anything to Anything:

1) Determine the Essential Thing That Makes the Original Awesome

In other words, figure out What it does. What sets this work of art apart from every other... why this work was worth creating in the first place. It very seldom has much to do with the surface things that most people would notice about the work at first glance. What makes it fun? What makes it compelling? What makes it moving? Star Wars isn't about lightsabers and exploding Death Stars. MacBeth isn't about witches and swordfights. Moby Dick isn't about a goddamn whale.

As we all know, the Essential Thing That Made The Golden Compass Awesome was the nuanced allegorical examination of religion from a humanist standpoint, standing in opposition to C.S. Lewis's Chronicles of Narn--BEARS! BEARSBEARSBEARS!!! BEARS IN ARMOR! DURRRRRRRRRRRRR!!!

2) Determine how the effect was originally created.

In other words, figure out How it does it. Star Wars isn't about lightsabers and exploding Death Stars, but those were important means to an end. To adapt a movie, you have to understand cinematic structure and how camera angles can build tension. To adapt a play, you have to understand how language works in a live space. You don't have to be able to do what the creator did in their original medium, but you have to be able to see the wires that made Peter Pan fly.

3) Use the tools of your own medium to achieve the same effect.

In other words, Do what it did, but not in the same way. Use your mastery of your own chosen medium to create the same artistic effect with the things that work in your medium. Don't try and re-create the old work in the new medium... you're not going to make a movie of Huckleberry Finn that's a better novel than the original one was. But you can make a great movie out of it.

Every bad adaptation that's ever been made can be traced to a failure in one of these three areas, and every great adaptation has hit on all three. Bear this in mind as you go forth to create.

Remember: Only you can prevent... whatever the hell this was.

Oh, and if you meet Uwe Boll on a road? Kill him. Please.

-- The Prolix Wag
This is why I only read The Smurfs in the original French.