'Unfilmable Books'

Haven't seen it. Has anyone? If it's worth it, I might add it onto Netflix, but it's still no doubt a tough book to handle, anyway.

Adding in: James Joyce, Flann O'Brien, Italo Calvino.
 
Joyce, at least, has had several adaptations of his works (including Ulysses).

James Joyce (I)

Here are the other two:

Flann O'Brien

Italo Calvino

As for that adaptation of Steppenwolf... I've not seen it myself, but I know it got a lot of favorable response, and people I know who saw it (and had read Hesse) thought it was a good adaptation to a different medium....
 
Well, there was an attempt at a W40K film a few years back. It failed because Games Workshop refused them film rights. Seeing this was to be a Uwe Boll movie, it's probably a good thing.

It wouldn't be nessercary to make a W40K film based on any of the books, the W40K universe is huge (I have the first edition book here as well as the next two, quite massive changes), and you could make dozens of action packed, massively CGIed war films with just the throwaway little bits of background in the rulesbooks. In fact the big problem is the size of the W40K universe. You are going to annoy some fans by not including thier favourite species.
 
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As far as the article is concerned, I was willing to play along right up until the last book. Anyone who thinks Peter Jackson should be let anywhere near The Book of the New Sun is barking mad. Jackson doesn't have a subtle bone in his body, and Gene Wolfe is all about the subtle.

I'm afraid when I try to think of unfilmable books I just come up with really obvious ones like Stapledon's Last and First Men and Star Maker. Also, I couldn't help thinking of a Wolfe story called The Eyeflash Miracles: the viewpoint character is a blind child; the story doesn't include any visual information at all - except when he dreams.
OK, how about Valis? How do you get all the bits from PKD's exegesis in there? There's not much point to it all without them. And what about the very important film the characters go to midway through the book? Interrupt the film to show ten or fifteen minutes of another film, then ten or fifteen minutes of the characters talking about it?

But I must be an optimist cause mostly I keep thinking of books and thinking why not? That's a different thread though.
 
I would have said the later HArry Potterbooks would be difficult to transfer to film , but they made them . I defy anyone though to understand what the heck is going on in Order Of The Phoenix without having first read the book. The first two were very nicely done , and imho were the closest repesentation of book-to-film translation ever.

I guess iwth a big enough budget and with plenty of 'directors interpretation' ANYTHING is translatable. I guess The Silmarillion would be pretty tricky though
 
I can think of a lot of books that are simply too big and complex for one movie, that would work very well filmed in several parts. Which doesn't always stop film-makers from trying to cram them into just one ... but that doesn't make the books unfilmable, it just means they've been filmed the wrong way.

But something like the Silmarillion, which is tends to be rather episodic, and contains some shorter stories that are complete in themselves, I could definitely see how the right director and producer could do justice to certain parts of it.
 
I don't think there is a chance of the Silmarillion ever being filmed. The Tolkien estate has never released the rights to that book.

Most of the individual stories could probably be filmed, but I don't know how the Valar and the creation of the world could be portrayed. It's too spiritual in nature, not really "visual". Yet without that part, you don't have much basis for the rest of the story. Maybe a way around that would be to have a short narration in the beginning, then launch into the other stories. But each one of those stories is epic enough to be a full movie in itself. It probably is better left as a book.
 
I liked the way the creation story was told at the start of the film "Watership Down"; I imagine the Music of the Ainur could be done in a similar way. But I agree that there's just too much in the Silmarillion to make even a series of films (given how film tends to expand narrative rather than contract it; many of the best films are adapted from short stories rather than novels). It would be like trying to film the entire Old Testement. And I can think of nothing in the Silmarillion that's as self-contained as, say, the Book of Exodus, so telling one part of the story without explaining what came before just wouldn't make sense.
 
There isn't anything inherently unfilmable about The Silmarillion, so it could be done. Look at John Huston's The Bible: In the Beginning (1966). While by no means entirely successful, it did adapt rather successfully the opening chapters of the Bible (including the creation story) and made a complete film; so something of the same sort could be done for The Silmarillion. And, as I noted earlier, if you can have a series of adaptations for the Mahabharata, then the complexity of The Silmarillion isn't a barrier, either.

The difference between this and, say, Stranger in a Strange Land, is that Tolkien's book is a compendium of various tales (though linked), whereas Stranger is a single novel which covers a considerable amount of material the lack of which would make any attempt at filming it bear no resemblance to the novel in either structure, feel, or intent.

To me, the question would be: what books are inherently unfilmable? That is, they either contain something (which is indispensable to any version of the book unless one completely leaves the original material behind) or are as a whole, the sort of material which simply cannot be translated well (if at all) to the visual media? I would argue that there aren't that many books of this nature, but they do exist.....
 
On that basis I would suggest that Riddley Walker by Russell Hoban would be impossible to film successfully, because a large part of the book is the degraded and distorted post-apocalyptic language in which the first-person narrative is told.
 
Dhalgren (Samuel R. Delany). I dare you to film that. You'd have to have someone utterly nuts. Uwe Boll!
 
gully_foyle said:
Hugh Jackman as Gully Foyle? I don't think so. It has to be someone alot less attractive, cold and brutal yet charismatic and aristocratic. A Daniel Craig type, but without the star power, because it is a Monte Christo story of someone rising up from anonymity to the heights of society, and having a too familiar face would kind of go against that.

And as for being un-filmable (and I probably amn't the first to point this out), it is apparently in production.
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I was looking at some of the older posts and found this one by you. I think that Michael Chiklis of "The Shield" and "Fantastic 4" fame would make a great Gully Foyle. He is a good actor without being really well known. Plus it would be easy for the makeup people to do the tattooing on his face and head.
 
I don't know about unfilmable, but would anyone have the nerve to make a film of The Satanic Verses?
 
Vladd67 said:
I don't know about unfilmable, but would anyone have the nerve to make a film of The Satanic Verses?
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Thousands.

Though one would have to ask how they'd intend to successfully tell all the parallel stories. There were four, right? Including the main story? Remove the "Mahound" part, and there's hardly anything offensive about the book, as far as I can recall.


I'd say The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco is unfilmable. They made a film, yeah, but it was a severe disappointment. There's no way you're getting Eco's story, with all the history, debate, politics, philosophy and wonderful, wonderful sarcasm, into anything that's played textless in front of your eyes.
 
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Read and you see pictures, hear words and sounds, you make the film in your head. Every book can be filmed, maybe some should be serialised, others made as mini-series for TV, but is it necessary.

Read and you see pictures, hear words and sounds - but they're your pictures, words and sounds. No one will ever film those.
 
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