Best Book to Film Translation

LOTR is the most impressive book-to-movie translation for sure... it's one of those types of films - a lot like Jaws and The Exorcist - that people have been trying to match ever since, and never really do.

I think, like Dune, it's going to be interesting to see someone else adapt it in the future. I believe we're expecting some kind of LOTR series shortly.

I was thinking of Blade runner vs. Phillip K. Dicks Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep. This might not match this thread exactly because Hampton Frascher basically used the book to create his own story. He did not include the strange religion that Deckard's wife was practicing, but it did include a lot of original story content of Frascher's. I thought the movie was better than the book.

Pet Sematary.

__________________
Happiness is having your own library card.

If I read the end of the book, would it help me figure out what was going on?

Let the Right One In definitely needs to be mentioned in a thread like this.

__________________

I recently watched a movie called The Unbearable Lightness of Being. It is quite an old movie dating back to 1980s. And it impressed me like no other movie ever! A blend of personal, historical, and professional drama. I decided then to read the book, the author is Milan Koondera, and it is even more impressive than the movie. I cannot say which translation is better - they two are incredible!

Jean de Floretta and Manon of the Spring Marcel Pagnol

These are the first two that came to mind when I saw this thread's title.

Still Jaws.

__________________
It's what you learn after you know it all that counts. - John Wooden
My IMDb page

Nosferatu (1922) 😝

I agree This book is a prime example why it is do hard to make a good movie from an excellent book. To explain what the unbearable lightness of being is requires some gimmick where you can explain what Kundera meant by the Unbearable lightness of being. In the book their are passages devoted to spelling out what the unbearable lightness of being means. The rest of the story is supposed to be an illustration. Well in the movie you get the illustration without the explanation. Any gimmick to squeeze the explanation into the movie would not be that easy. Lots of narration usually detracts in a movie. The movie made the right move by telling the story the way they did, but I am not sure you would understand the "Unbearable Lightness of Being" without reading the book.

The World According to Garp.


This is another example where the film maker was more successful in presenting parts of the book, and capturing the core of the story, while leaving large sections out of the movie. I think this is the best example of bringing John Irving to the big screen with the possible exception of The Cider House Rules. Hill even gives you enough in the movie to figure out what it means to be an author or writer (which I believe is the key to Garp.) There have been plenty of other attempts to translate Irving to the big screen, but these are the only ones I thought were successful. I've also seen Simon Birch (irving would not let them use the title "A Prayer for Owen Meany) because he thought the film did not capture his book. The other one I saw was "The Hotel New Hampshire" which I enjoyed, but I thought it was not as good of a adaptation as the two above.

The film ends up arguably the reverse of the book, in the latter the Androids/Replicants end up more as a warning of dehumanisation, in the former its actually there human nature that's highlighted. I suspect a significant part of that shift actually came from both writers working under Scott's impetus. .