Adaptations Quotes

“In the movie I was played by an actor who actually looked more like me than the character the author portrayed in the book: I wasn't blond, I wasn't tan, and neither was the actor. I also suddenly became the movie's moral compass, spouting AA jargon, castigating everyone's drug use and trying to save Julian. (I'll sell my car," I warn the actor playing Julian's dealer. "Whatever it takes.") This was slightly less true of Blair's character, played by a girl who actually seemed like she belonged in our group-- jittery, sexually available, easily wounded. Julian became the sentimentalized version of himself, acted by a talented, sad-faced clown, who has an affair with Blair and then realizes he has to let her go because I was his best bud. "Be good to her," Julian tells Clay. "She really deserves it." The sheer hypocrisy of this scene must have made the author blanch. Smiling secretly to myself with perverse satisfaction when the actor delivered that line, I then glanced at Blair in the darkness of the screening room.”
― Bret Easton Ellis, Imperial Bedrooms

“The book was blunt and had an honesty about it, whereas the movie was just a beautiful lie.”
― Bret Easton Ellis, Imperial Bedrooms

“The comic book is not the book. the graphic novel is not the novel. The same, of course, is true of films and television. When we move a story from one medium to another, no matter how faithful we attempt to be, some changes are inevitable. Each medium has its own demands, own restrictions, its own way of telling a story.”
― George R.R. Martin

“There were three people in my home and I was the only one showing Electromagnetic Hypersensitivity and reactivity to the radio frequency transmitting utility meters. For these reasons I did not shield my home and took the route of adapting my body to the toxic electromagnetic environment.”
― Steven Magee, Curing Electromagnetic Hypersensitivity

“In America, film is the highest form of art that the public aspires to. People will come to me and say ‘Oh, your book was so good, they ought to make a movie out of it!’ To which I reply ‘Well, why? It’s already a book.”
― Orson Scott Card

“Andrew Davies has said he prefers his authors dead, and I can see there is only a limited usefulness in a live one when it comes to adaptation.”
― Alan Hollinghurst

“Fuck the original.”
― Lady Ristretto

“I think I should be allowed to be only fair, or even mediocre, for a while.”
― Jim Bouton, Ball Four

“When we love something, we always want more of it, whether it’s good for us or not. This is as true of ice cream and French fries as it is of great books. It’s only natural to wish for more time with our favorite characters, but an essential part of what makes us fall in love with a book is the fact that it ends (something it wouldn’t hurt to remind the heads of Hollywood studios). When there can be no more of something, it makes what already exists more precious and perfect.”
― Emily Uecker

“Swish, I swing from tree to tree. My feet are like hands - I’m a chimpanzee!”
― Julie Murphy, I've Got Feet!: Fantastical Feet of the Animal World

“I feel that one of the reasons I enjoy having films that are historical or revisionist history or a period film is because I think it's one of the things that cinema can do best. It can do it [well] in two areas. One is that you can recreate the past in a movie and present it in a fictional way, because we know what it looked like. And the second reason is, by having time pass, you can examine the truth about something that happened in the past, because you've been able to look at it through the prism of time.”
― Robert Zemeckis

“Our inherited legacy of adaptatios is literally precious. Even the poorest parents give their children vast riches, in the form of senses, emotions, and mental faculties that have been optimized through millions of years of product development.”
― Geoffrey Miller, Spent: Sex, Evolution, and Consumer Behavior

“Our inherited legacy of adaptations is literally precious. Even the poorest parents give their children vast riches, in the form of senses, emotions, and mental faculties that have been optimized through millions of years of product development.”
― Geoffrey Miller, Spent: Sex, Evolution, and Consumer Behavior

“One lesson is that to be second is not to be secondary or inferior; likewise, to be first is not to be originary or authoritative. Yet, as we shall see, disparaging opinions on adaptation as a secondary mode—belated and therefore derivative—persist. One aim of this book is to challenge that denigration.”
― Linda Hutcheon, A Theory of Adaptation

“And there is yet another possibility: our interest piqued, we may actually read or see that so-called original after we have experienced the adaptation, thereby challenging the authority of any notion of priority. Multiple versions exist laterally, not vertically.”
― Linda Hutcheon, A Theory of Adaptation

“Neither the product nor the process of adaptation exists in a vacuum:
they all have a context—a time and a place, a society and a culture.”
― Linda Hutcheon, A Theory of Adaptation

“[T]here must be something particularly appealing about adaptations as adaptations.
Part of this pleasure, I want to argue, comes simply from repetition with variation, from the comfort of ritual combined with the piquancy of surprise. Recognition and remembrance are part of the pleasure (and risk) of experiencing an adaptation; so too is change.”
― Linda Hutcheon, A Theory of Adaptation

“Although adaptations are also aesthetic objects in their own right, it is only as inherently double or multilaminated works that they can be theorized as adaptations.
An adaptation’s double nature does not mean, however, that proximity or fidelity to the adapted text should be the criterion of judgment or the focus of analysis.”
― Linda Hutcheon, A Theory of Adaptation

“Adaptation is repetition, but repetition without replication.”
― Linda Hutcheon, A Theory of Adaptation

“First, seen as a formal entity or product, an adaptation is an announced and extensive transposition of a particular work or works. This “transcoding” can involve a shift of medium (a poem to a film) or genre (an epic to a novel), or a change of frame and therefore context: telling the same story from a different point of view, for instance, can create a manifestly different interpretation. Transposition can also mean a shift in ontology from the real to the fictional, from a historical account or biography to a fictionalized narrative or drama. [...]
Second, as a process of creation, the act of adaptation always involves both (re-)interpretation and then (re-)creation; this has been called both appropriation and salvaging, depending on your perspective. [...]
Third, seen from the perspective of its process of reception, adaptation is a form of intertextuality: we experience adaptations (as adaptations) as palimpsests through our memory of other works that resonate through repetition with variation.”
― Linda Hutcheon, A Theory of Adaptation