This may be an oversimplification, but there are two kinds of adaptations from fiction to film that occur in general film production. The first and most common is the process by which a studio, an agent, or even a director or star buys a novel that would make good fodder for a film. “Fodder” is an appropriate word, because novels were and, in many cases, remain material to be chewed up and digested in order to fill the enormous appetite for stories that filmmaking lives on. Two functions are served: the material is there for the writers to get to work on, and whatever cachet may lie in the original fiction might be carried over to help sell the film. The resulting film may bear some, little, or no relation to its literary source, and is usually judged on that premise.

But there is a second kind of adaptation, rare and even more rarely successful, where a filmmaker wants to realize a narrative of written fiction in film because that work carries such meaning and emotional drive that the pressure to do it in cinematic form is great. The problem with this gets to the very root of fiction-to-film translations. A great work of fiction has already achieved a completeness of form that makes it all but impossible, except perhaps for the most talented filmmaker, to visualize it in the form appropriate to his medium – to make a new narrative in a different expressive form from that of the “original”.