Show and Tale

Do books that tell a great story also make great films? Are these two different forms where the twain shall not meet?  While I can instantly think of films like Ben-Hur, Frankenstein, One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest or for that matter most of the films made by Satyajit Ray who always chose great stories and turned them into visual delights on celluloid. One can also think of great books that turned into horrible films.

Satyajit Ray's book Our Films, Their Films says that he always relied on taking stories where he knew the landscape intimately so that it was authentic.  Or else, he took the help of a story where the author was immensely familiar with the setting whether it was rural Bengal (Pather Panchali) which was based on the novel by Bibhutibhushan Banerjee and set to music by Pandit Ravi Shankar. Or my eternal favorite Jalsaghar (The Music Room) based on a novel by Tarashankar Banerjee and set to music by Vilayat Khan.

Atul Agnihotri’s adaptation of Chetan Bhagat’s One Night @ The Call Centre as Hello has hit the silver screen and so will his Five Point Someone.  The author really benefits because his/her story reaches out to the maximum number of people and the extra moolah never hurt anyone! Govind Nihalani, who earlier adapted Mahasweta Devi’s Hazaar Chaurasi Ki Maa and is now in talks with author Mukul Deva for Lashkar, doesn’t think adapting books is a cakewalk. “A novel, a short story or even a play can be adapted into a movie because it provides the filmmaker with a proper narrative graph—beginning, middle, end—whereas an original story takes much longer to develop.” For him, a book is like a goldmine: You have to keep reading it to identify its significant elements. After all Satyajit Ray turned Munshi Premchand's book Shatranj Ke Khiladi in a full length film - while the original story was barely seven pages long.The Times of India recently did a story on this trend about Bollywood is also reaching out to popular fiction to make its new breed of movies. My book's editor V K Karthika is quoted as saying,

“Smarter commercial books will be noticed by the film industry and, to some extent, there may be influences but we have to see how the relationship between films and IWE works. Cinema has certain formulas that may not work for books.”

"In fact, author Abhijit Bhaduri of Mediocre But Arrogant fame fell out with his producers because they wanted to make the film with their chosen actors, which wasn’t acceptable to him. “If I’m re-approached, I’ll agree only if I have the confidence that the person will understand the book’s sensibility. Also, the person has to be someone whose work I’ve enjoyed, like Aamir Khan, Farhan Akhtar or Anurag Kashyap.” Wishful thinking? Not exactly. The IWE author is well on his way from the musty little bookshop to the 70 mm extravaganza. Impossible is nothing! "