6 Answers2026-07-17
I have a few credits here: A Severed Head (1970 film), The Sea, The Sea (1988 TV), The Italian Girl (1991 TV), The Black Prince (1996 TV). And that’s it. There may be other projects in development but none have hit the ‘rumor’ or ‘radio’ stages yet. As a body of work, Ishiguro’s is tiny yet monumental. It is literary work which resists translation in purely written form. Or maybe it just needs a good interpreter? For A Fairly Honourable Defeat I would cast Alice Birch.
8 Answers2025-10-06
So these adaptations are sort of a mess, but mostly fun. They are the literary equivalent of an unhealthy snack that you devour because it tastes so good, even though you know it’s terrible for you. ‘ Scruples’ is probably the most coherent, because the book was written as episodic TV, so it translates best. ‘ Princess Daisy’ is a beautiful disaster of a short film that tries to condense decades of a global saga into a short space and it all feels a bit mad and rushed. ‘ Mistral’s Daughter’ is really good as a miniseries, because it’s able to allow the story to breathe in a way that feels natural for the family centric story. The acting is very hit and miss – in one scene, someone can be completely reserved, and in the next, he or she can be soap-opera-like in their behavior. But it’s all part of the fun. You watch these because of the clothes, the score, and the sheer incredible-ness of the plots. These are not serious attempts at “quality” TV. They are just happy, glamorous entertainments. For the most part, they succeed at what they’re trying to do.
5 Answers2026-07-30
I saw A Million Little Pieces last year, after the memoir had been mostly exposed as non-true. For some reason, they made the film anyway, probably because the true parts of the memoir were so dramatic and because of the “scandal” surrounding them. (Maybe people would come to see it.) The film got little attention. (It was pretty weak, anyway.) Then there’s The Reader, which is a “prestige” adaptation. It received an Oprah sticker, but very little box office or praise in terms of overall quality of adaptation, as the material and the people adapting it are so so so important. Some books are very, very visual, while others are completely locked within the heads of their characters.
10 Answers2025-06-06
All of her books were read by me last year, and brought up in my book club recently. My answer to this question would be zero. Although there are many adaptations of her books, they are not traditional movies. ‘Olive Kitteridge’ is a long film that was released in 4 parts, and ‘Lucy Barton’ is a filmed play. The fact that there are no movies means that there is no need to judge them. Also, it’s possible that a big budget movie would change the plot or even add romance where there is none. The way that the adaptations have been made are perfect for the formats in which they have been released. Even though I would love to see ‘The Burgess Boys’ made into a movie, I think that the existing adaptations were released in the perfect format.
7 Answers2025-11-10
It’s a little known TV film. Perhaps that’s because it’s by the other Brontë sister. It’s been so long since I saw it that I can only recall the style, lots of woolly jumpers, lots of grey skies, lots of wooden panelled rooms. But it looked very realistic to me. The one romance in the film is so low-key that it almost gets forgotten. I know that wouldn’t be the case in most adaptations, but I suppose it is accurate to the novel. It is more a story of how to survive in a world of work and how to remain true to oneself. A faithful adaptation, but without any real drive from the director to make it any better than that.
5 Answers2026-07-06
At 34, Townsend was almost middle aged in 1947 when the young Margaret first set eyes on him. Their brief affair makes for an interesting read these days. How people perceive age gaps has altered so much in recent years, often without them even realizing it. A 16 year difference would raise hardly an eyebrow today yet in the 1940s it was nothing short of scandalous. There’s Downton Abbey for you. The social norms of the time were strictly dictated and it was all so impossible. Townsend and Margaret clearly adored each other but their love was doomed by the conventions of the era.
11 Answers2025-06-24
A better use of time pondering a film adaptation of David Lipsky’s fences than actually reading the rest of Lipsky’s work and the authors he draws upon. Read The Pale King for more agonizing beautiful focus on boredom. Read George Saunders for great satire and great humanity. Read A Naked Singularity by David NapirPolikoff for another long and miserable book about a failing system. The question of the film adaptation is a red herring. The book exists. It’s on a shelf somewhere. Read it directly rather than waiting for someone to reduce it to a simple movie experience. The climb is the point.
4 Answers2025-07-12
The books of Egan Library have been well adapted to the big screen in a few cases. While The Goldfinch screen adaptation left many book fans dissatisfied, Where’d You Go, Bernadette is a beautiful film that combines humor and heart just as the novel did. A film adaptation of Jennifer Egan’s novel A Visit from the Goon Squad is being made as a series, and could be fantastic. There has been talk of a Secret History film for years and it would make Tartt fans incredibly happy. These novels have the depth to be great screen stories.
9 Answers2025-06-24
This is really fascinating. So many great points about how it’s unfilmable, but then people said that about ‘Life of Pi’ and ‘Cloud Atlas’ too. Difficult books are often the best source material for films, because they challenge the filmmaker to find new ways to represent them. The internal monologue of the novel would be the biggest challenge to represent on film, possibly by using shifting color palettes and distorted sound to represent the protagonist’s memory, or even using surreal flashbacks. It would take a really visionary director to make this work, though. Someone like Lynne Ramsay, who is so good at representing subjective, traumatic interiority would be my first choice. The impossibility of it all is probably what makes it so attractive.
8 Answers2026-07-27
No adaptation has been made yet, but I have one wild idea for an animated film. Rather than going with a typical Disney adaptation, I would want it to be a little more artistic, like a Studio Ghibli film or a Cartoon Saloon film (such as The Song of the Sea). The bizarre physicality of the circus could be portrayed beautifully in an animated film and the completely realized magic would be less to feel fake than in live-action. The muted colors of the film with splashes of red would be stunning. Rather than trying to get the emotions of the characters right in live-action and failing, the emotions of the quiet heart of the story would likely shine through much more in an animated adaptation. It’s a long shot, but if there are any animators out there, then this would be the perfect magic to bring to life.