Quotes

[on the Disney version of 'Mary Poppins'] If you read the history of what happened after Travers sold the film rights, you find that she said she was very unhappy with the adaptation. She expected, in every way, for it to be more faithful to the stories and to the character. Legend is Travers watched the film with tears of grief welling. She claimed she felt betrayed.

Film is a literary form with its own creative constraints and possibilities. The finest adaptations capture the best of the book - story, characters, themes, the voice of the author - always carefully balancing preservation and new invention.. To me, adaptation encompasses translation, interpretation, even transformation. Sometimes, depending on the amount of invention needed to adapt a book to the screen, the most faithful you can be is to write a script 'inspired by', not 'based on'.

Collaboration between book author and screenwriter, in which the author has real input, happens more often in indie films where the writer is also the director. A screenwriter must always respect the story, feel a responsibility to it, know it inside and out - and then write a film that honors it while not necessarily re-creating it for the screen.