Harry Potter News and Commentary
Found this article on The Torch Online. I post it for two reasons: One, it’s a nice, thoughtful article on a topic we’ve discussed much here regarding adapting books or comics for the big screen, and Two, it mentions specific books/comics we’ve talked about much here, namely The Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, and the Watchmen. Plus, our very own Matthew/Korg is mentioned. See if you can find where! 
Feel free to share your thoughts on the article here. Enjoy!
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{ 35 comments… read them below or add one }
Hello, there! I’m the writer of this particular article, and I just stumbled upon your mention. Thanks for the love! And I just reread the article, and I can’t for the life of me find where I mentioned a Matthew/Korg, and now I won’t be able to have a good night’s sleep until I find out.
By the way, I love your site!
An interesting article, although it doesn’t hit the real difference between books and movies at all.
The article says that movies and books are different in the areas of pacing and number of characters. In essence, the writer here is pointing to two different aspects of the same problem, that of numerical limitation. Books have more “time” available than movies, which are limited to (appx) 2 hours or so. And books can also introduce more characters than movies, he claims, because of practical issues such as money (actors have to be paid; characters on the page don’t).
I would agree with his first reason — obviously most movies are shorter than the books serving as source material. I would disagree lightly on the second reason: Limitations as to number of characters is rarely a money (or ego or whatever) issue in movies of this scope, but is a consequence of the pacing issue: There simply isn’t as much time to introduce or explore as many characters.
However, I believe this article misses the real difference between books and movies:
Books give us private access into characters’ minds. Movies do not.
Many writers with experience in both worlds would say that is the difference between them: When we watch a Harry Potter movie, we simply don’t know what Harry is thinking. We might know what he is feeling, depending on what the actor is able to convey. But we cannot follow his thought processes, his decisions, his memories unless he tells someone else.
(The upcoming Sherlock Holmes, by the way, makes a heroic attempt to get inside Holmes’s mind, using all sorts of smart and stylistic moviemaking tricks to do so. Given that we’re dealing w/ a character whose most unique characteristic is his mind, I think they made great choices. But notice how hard the filmmakers have to work at it, notice that even with all the effort expended to get us inside Holmes’s thought processes, we still know very little about his inner workings, and we only have access when the filmmaker allows it and goes to great effort to allow it…. as opposed to the easy access we have to, say, Harry’s thoughts and choices and memories in the books…)
…I’m working on my own little “fan fiction,” I guess you could call it… or the screenwriterly version of fan fiction… Fwiw, I’m writing my own version of the Deathly Hallows movies, just for fun…. So believe me, I’m very aware of all the adaptation issues, including pacing and character choice… And getting inside a character’s mind is still the biggest difference of all.
Tim, great that you found the site here! I appreciated your article, & it is an issue we’ve talked about a lot on this site. I hope it’ll draw some discussion here & also direct more people over to The Torch Online. I’ve really been finding a lot of useful material over there.
My comment on Matthew/Korg is a bit of an inside joke. Matthew, along with myself, absolutely despises the Jackson adaptations of LOTR. So, I was taking your one statement in the article “…there still remains a faction of rabid fanboys who have turned their back on the movies (often after watching them many times to find out just why they hate them.)” and hoping people who know Matthew & his views on Jackson’s films would recognize the joke. My out was going to be that I didn’t say he was mentioned by name. So, sorry for the confusion on that.
Again, great that you found the site. I see Janet’s already written a great comment on your article, even if it does disagree with part of your article. Feel free to come by anytime!
I love the plea that those in the fan community maintain a level of civilized and polite discourse when bringing up (their) opinions via the internet.
Would that we could do that.
As for Korg is he one of those fanboys who watched the movies over and over again to see why he hates them? Or is he Ralph from Christchurch, NZ who wrote the Oracle asking about rabid and aggressive fans? And if neither, then who?
Janet raises an interesting point about how hard it is for movies to show what’s happening inside a character’s mind. Makes me think of the times when a great actor is able to show us just that.
Watch the end of The Accidental Tourist as the character played by William Hurt sees a young boy as he is driving away in a taxi. The expression on his face shows his heartache better than any words could. The same is true for Heath Ledger’s performance at the end of Brokeback Mountain: watch his face as he sees the two shirts hanging together in Jack’s closet, and later, as he touches the same shirts now hanging in his own closet. Or George Clooney’s face as he sees the horses standing in the mist at dawn in Michael Clayton. Or going further back, look at the expression of baffled rage on Rod Steiger’s face as he watches Sidney Poitier’s northern police detective in In the Heat of the Night.
My point: movies can’t give us an exact report of the thoughts going through a character’s mind, as can a book. But they can show a character’s emotions very effectively, and sometimes more powerfully than can books.
Red Rocker, yes, I loved that quote too! Made me chuckle. Although I’m guessing Tim meant it seriously.
Anyway, I think we’ve tried to be polite on this subject, even while oftentimes vociferously disagreeing about the relative merits of books and adaptations. It’s always an ongoing effort, though.
REVGEORGE!
I recognised myself in that line straight away.
Yes, I have the extended versions and have watched them a lot and what I dislike about the movies has definitely crystallised in my mind.
Regarding not being able to show what characters are thinking in movies aren’t there ways to get around that? The actor’s skill, possibly using some sort of narration, one character talking to another. I know they can be a bit clunky in a movie but can definitely do the job.
Matthew
Korg, yes, of course there are ways to hint at what a character is thinking, and as Red Rocker points out, definitely to see what a character is feeling. But the heart of a novelistic experience is to be inside a character, to be so intimately connected as to know that person’s thoughts in a way that no other character in the story experiences. That’s definitionally impossible in a movie, where we are always, of necessity, outside the characters…..
Korg — I’m with you on the LOTR movies… After the first one, my husband wouldn’t sit next to me because apparently I spent much of the time muttering, “No!” “That’s not right,” and the like. Don’t get me started on the Sword that was Broken….
Janet! I just went to your blog! You are a professor at my old alma mater! I got my second Masters at USC School of Cinema! I don’t remember you though – pity you probably started after I graduated in the mid 90s. I’m not in film anymore – well, sort of – where I work now as a music director – I also run the film series. You are fantastic!!!!!!!!!!!! I don’t know you and I love you!!!!!
Janet – maybe you can tell us more about your thoughts on interpolation in screen adaptations. I was actually kind of shocked at some of the small interpolations in the Half-blood prince. Small ones to be sure – but were they necessary in your opinion?
I once saw an old British TV adaptation of a Jane Austen novel (I think… my memory is a bit sketchy here) in which they actually did try to follow the book word for word, scene for scene, and every line of dialogue verbatim. It was an unwatchable train wreck. And I like Jane Austen.
Another example that comes to mind is the recent forgettable adaptation of The Gospel of John, which tried to put every word from the Good News Translation (maybe that was the problem right there?) directly on screen. Yeah. “I am… speaking… Holy… Scripture! Spontaneously! And very… naturally!” Narrator: “Then Peter said…”
Contrariwise, judging from the trailers, I’d say Sherlock Holmes looks to be one of those films Roger Ebert has described as “inspired by the book, because some of the characters have similar names.” (Can anyone offer me some hope by disproving me here, or by bringing back Basil Rathbone from the dead?)
Speaking of Ebert, he’s on record as saying what’s important is not how faithful a movie is to its book (where applicable) but how well it works on its own terms as a movie. I guess I can see that point of view; if I wanted the experience of reading the book again, it’s on my shelf. On the other hand, his recent review of The Road seemed disappointed that they didn’t capture the intangible aspects of Cormac McCarthy’s prose (while conceding it couldn’t be captured). “I’ve been saying for years that a film critic must review the film before him, and not how ‘faithful’ the film is to the book — as if we’re married to the book, and somehow screen adaptation is adultery. I realize my own fault is in being so very familiar with Cormac McCarthy. That may affect my ability to view any film adaptation of his work afresh…. “
How about some examples of novel-to-screen adaptations that are more or less totally successful in both ways? I’d submit Little Dorrit starring Alec Guinness and Derek Jacobi, and maybe Jane Eyre starring Zelah Clark and oh-my-lord-Timothy Dalton as Rochester.
I don’t think any of this is quite an answer yet. But it is a fascinating question.
Speaking of Derek Jacobi, the BBC adaptation of I, Claudius was quite good and reasonably faithful to the books. The biggest change IIRC was the episode where we saw just how Drusilla died.
I, Clavdivs.
Joivre — Thanks for the kind words!…. No, I’ve only been teaching at USC for a few years, so our paths definitely didn’t cross… I love it there!…
As for some of the specifics in HBP… You know, I try not to watch the HP movies too many times, because I don’t want them to replace the movie in my head when I read the books. (As it is, some of the screen characters poke their way in.) So I’m not sure I can answer about specific choices that might have been made… I do remember feeling that much of the exposition they left out (esp. about the Horcruxes) could probably be covered in the last movie… and being absolutely perplexed as to why they added the burning-of-the-Burrow sequence. Was there something you were thinking of specifically?
Btw, here’s my thoughts on the movie at the time of its release…. http://quoththemaven.blogspot.com/2009/07/movie-thoughts-harry-potter-and-half.html
Eric — I’ve seen Sherlock Holmes already….
I have read the Sherlock Holmes books and stories, but am not particularly a serious Holmes fan. So I enjoyed the movie. But I can pretty much guarantee that any serious Holmes fan will *not* like the movie.
That being said, I think the trailers badly misserved the movie. I expected to see something closer to Beverly Hills Cop in tone — lots of action, lots of humor. That’s not what the movie is at all. It’s not nearly as funny as the trailer tried to make it seem, nor as action-filled.
What I really *liked* about the movie: (1) The way they managed to let us inside Holmes’s thought processes through some well-done visual storytelling techniques. What they accomplished is very hard to pull off, and I thought they managed to let us understand the brilliance of Holmes’s intellect without the clumsy choices of just having other characters talk about how smart he is. (2) Robert Downey’s performance. Really, the man is the best actor out there right now. He just is. Thanks to him, I felt how at sea Holmes is always being the smartest person in the room… Without that performance, the movie probably wouldn’t hold up.
What I really *didn’t* like: The almost total desaturation of color throughout. (A similar problem with HP6, of course).
I’m seeing it again this Saturday, so we’ll see if it holds up to a second viewing…
Ah. I’m a fairly serious Holmes fan, so I may want to give it a miss, then (it is as I feared). The other thing I’m wondering, though, is if whether the film would work for me if they had given it a completely different title– say “Steampunk Holmes” or “Sherwood Jones, Detective”? In other words, is it completely removed from the books except for character names, or is it trying to emulate them with radical (i.e. annoying) departures? Or in other other words, does it try (and fail) to live up to the books, or is it something a fan of the books might enjoy as long as they weren’t comparing it to the books?
That can tie into the earlier discussion of how (and whether) one’s reading of a book will unavoidably influence one’s opinion of the film…
The game’s afoot!
janet — are you conversant at all with Maestro R. McKee? The (alleged) screenwriting guru? Because you preempted my allusion to his quote, that the best books often make the worst movies, because movies can’t go inside the characters’ minds. They are disparate art forms, but not entirely so.
Some of what Peter Jackson and Co. did is unforgivable–especially when he (unlike the Jane Austen movie mentioned) had adequate actors and writers to make the scenes from the book work successfully on screen. (Don’t tell me they needed to murder Faramir’s character for the sake of pacing, or we’ll have a discussion about baloney! There’s only a few things about those movies I hate, but about those few I’m insufferably bitter…)
As Eric quotes Ebert as saying, much of the difficulty is what works as a film and what works as a book–and, I might add, what various readers and viewers have been conditioned to like. So, Tim said:
But really, why is ‘long and leisurely paced’ implied to be a defect in movies? Consider, to grab a few great titles at random, The Great Escape, Twelve Angry Men, A Man for All Seasons, and, yes, Star Wars: A New Hope. All fairly long, and fairly slow moving. And among the greatest moments in film history.
The point being, I think directors and screenwriters can often make too many concessions to a particular contemporary screen vernacular, and murder something vital in the book. (I’m looking at you, Mr. Newell…)
Alternatively, they can so potently marry the two art forms, that they capture the essence of the book almost better than the author. The only films I can think of that does that is Silas Marner starring Ben Kingsley, and the aforementioned Little Dorrit.
Though I so thoroughly enjoyed The Count of Monte Cristo (Jim Caviezel, Guy Pearce), and Les Miserables (Liam Neeson, Geoffrey Rush), that I’m afraid to read the books lest they spoil the movies. Maybe that makes me an inconsistent theorist or something…
For kicks, my husband and I watched the Goblet of Fire film two weeks ago. This is jusifiably the worst film adaptation of the series so far, widely panned.
However, removed by time from my personal feelings about the adaptation, I saw that, as a film, it’s one that can stand alone on its own. In other words, someone seeing it without having read the books, gets a coherent story that they can easily follow, that makes sense.
Book fans will never be fully satisfied about any adapation. But if Newell was creating a film for the great uninformed, he did a rather good job.
Eric — The Sherlock Holmes might very well work for you if they had titled it Steampunk Holmes — which is very much what it is, btw… I think that depends on whether you like this sort of film in general.
It does not take its story from the Holmes canon. I think it’s an effort to tell a Holmesian case that never made it into the canon. That being said, there are definite efforts to be faithful to the characters (even the cocaine use is hinted at, very subtly because it is a PG-13 movie). For instance, the line “The game’s afoot” does appear, while “Elementary, my dear Watson” (which of course never appears in the stories) does not appear. Also not in the movies are many elements associated with Holmes that actually owe their existence to the Basil Rathbone movies (the deerstalker hat, etc.).
I enjoyed it. But given the pain I sometimes felt watching the LOTR movies, I won’t recommend this to a Holmes fan. Caveat emptor.
And Mr. Pond — Yes — What they did to Faramir in the LOTR movies made me froth at the mouth! Between that, and the way they eviscerated the Sword that was Broken and the Aragorn/Arwen story, I will never be a fan of the movies. Sure, they did a nice job with the battle scenes — but LOTR was never about the battle scenes, imho.
Yes, I am familiar w/ Robert McKee, though I do not recommend “Story” to my students. I think McKee is just a little too fond of himself, and his pompous attitude comes forth in his writing. I also tend to pay less attention to screenwriting gurus who are not themselves screenwriters.
Capturing the essence of a book involves so much…. I think it starts with a combination of compassion and ruthlessness. Compassion for the readers of the book and their deep love of all that went into it, and a deep understanding of what moments and elements they will sorely miss if they don’t make it into the movie…. Combined with utter ruthlessness in slashing out any elements that don’t drive the story forward to its inevitable yet surprising conclusion. Obviously there are some conflicts involved in the balance….
I am almost ready to start writing actual pages on my “fan fiction” screenplay of DH… it will be interesting (to me, if no one else) to see how that balance actually works out….
Your fanfic screenplay is something I’d like to see, Janet!
I recall several threads on Usenet a few years ago which were crossposted between the alt.fan.harry-potter and the rec.arts.books.tolkien newsgroups. No matter what the thread was originally about, it always seemed to end in the following type of flame war:
Etc. Evidently the bigger a fan you are of a given book(s), the more you’re likely to resent whatever changes are made in adapting it…
I’m not a fan of the LOTR movies for a lot of reasons, but departure from the canon isn’t one of them. Probably the main reason is because the movies drag. I especially dislike the Arwen/Aragon sections because they drag extra long. If the movies had actually moved a little faster, I would have forgiven a lot more.
Janet, thanks… now it seems I have to choose between my lifelong affection for Conan Doyle and my growing interest in “that sort of film in general.” Oh dear…
Red Rocker, that’s very interesting. To me it’s precisely the other way around–I would have enjoyed the series even more if only they hadn’t charged headlong through some of the book’s best moments (Rivendell, Lothlorien, the encounter at the gates of Gondor…). Though I’d agree that ROTK in particular suffered from ending sprawl. Can two people really read movies that differently, or am I failing to pick up on some sarcasm?
Oh – two, three – a hundred different ways to read a movie. My take is they could have lollygagged for days on Aragorn and I still would have liked more, please. They could have done a slow track into close-ups, slo-mos, 40 page scenes with no dialogue, a montage and interpolations in a hot tub, and I still would not have been angry about the changes. When someone is that sexy – story, schmory.
Joivre, I felt the same way…except in regards to Liv Tyler not Viggo.
Regarding adaptations, it’s not changes to a beloved book for the purposes of a movie that I don’t like, it always comes down to what changes they made or what they added in & why they did these things.
OK, I think Mortensen is mildly hunky too. But totally miscast in a pseudo-medieval idiom. I liked him much better as the Russian gangster Nikolai, and the Chicago hit-man turned diner owner Tom. I expect to like him a lot as the Man in the post apocalyptic The Road. And oddly enough, I liked him – all hoarse menace – as the angel Lucifer opposite Christopher Walken in The Prophecy. As a legendary heroic king who leads the forces of good against the legions of Sauron, not so much. The scenes with Arwen felt like they were filmed in slow motion, underwater. Honestly, not a word of sarcasm.
As for the action scenes, they seemed to merge together in my mind: if you’ve seen one group of armed horsemen riding against grotesque orcs and orc-allies, you’ve seen them all.
Huh. Totally miscast as a pseudo-medieval. I’m going to have to think about that. I thought his portrayal was pretty good. But then – maybe I really am looking at him superficially. Mind you – he is handsome, but usually I can see past that and into the talent. I see I might have to watch some of his scenes again just to make sure I’m not being blinded by his rugged viking looks. Who would you have cast Red?
Rugged Viking looks…total mush-mouth in LOTR. He delivered his incomprehensible lines as if his mouth was filled with oatmeal.
Well, looking in the immediate vicinity, I don’t think that Sean Bean would have done too bad a job of it. And with his British stage-training, not only would we have understood what he was saying, he would have given full value to his lines.
This isn’t the first time I’ve said this: I think the Bean and Mortensen could have been interchanged. We would have gotten a darker, sexier Boromir. And a more compelling Aragorn.
BTW, I know a lot of Danes, and they do have a tendency to swallow their consonants.
Oh no! Really? Hmmmmm… Come to think of it – I really don’t recall him actually talking in the film. I must have been concentrating on the cinematography during those moments. Or perhaps the scenery. Or the way Viggo mounted his steed. Or the way he drew his sword. I must get to the bottom of this. I think I shall sacrifice myself for the sake of scholarship and re-watch his scenes over at Youtube.
Brilliant Red Rocker! That is true! I never thought of interchanging him for Bean. Sean Bean actually is a great actor who carries himself with a certain regal restraint and inner strength that would certainly have enhanced the credibility of the future King. And you’re right about Mortenson as Boromir.
If you’ve said that before – I never saw it. But good choice.
I don’t know that you should do that. It could be entirely too perilous for you.
For those interested, I’ve created two topics over at The Hogshead forum, one is for those who like Jackson’s adaptations of Lord of the Rings, if any such people really exist…
And the other is for those who do not like Jackson’s butcherings, I mean adaptations, of Lord of the Rings.
For bonus points, see if you can guess which topic I’m more likely to comment on.
Btw, I think Sean Bean was one of the things they really got right with the movies. I agree that perhaps switching him & Mortenson in the roles of Aragorn & Boromir could’ve vastly improved things.
Whew! What a relief. Thanks for taking that picture down Revgeorge. The gargantuan pictures and huge images on the fronteipiece of this blog don’t jibe with me aesthetically. The meat is the word.
You’re welcome. I saw that it was interfering with some other headlines. I never really wanted to use that picture to begin with because of the size but couldn’t find anything better at the time I put up the post.