From books to the big screen a lot changes. Many great books become box office disasters because the movies fail to capture the essence of the book in an equally powerful manner.
The challenge for a director is to create a work that is not some kind of parasitic infection of a host literary text but has independent existence. Irritating as it can be to writers, the resulting work should be the vision of the director rather than the novelist. Obviously successful in this subsumption are the group of movies that, though derived from novels, have distracted from their origins to the extent that few would consider them eligible for this kind of survey: Psycho and Vertigo, The Parallax View and The Graduate. Each of these lives on celluloid rather than as a work on paper.
A few days ago I mentioned being uneasy about The Sea's imminent adaptation for the big screen (despite the fact that Banville will be writing the screenplay). I need to remind myself that several mediocre books have been transformed by capable directors into memorable movies and several movies match the charm of the books that inspired them (yeah Krithiga, I know, LOTR for starters).
