I was rewatching Nicholas Winding Refn’s Drive for the many-th time — the cast! Ryan Gosling! Bryan Cranston! Ron Perlman! my god, Albert Brooks! — and this time I noticed it was adapted from a novel by James Sallis. The guy who played Gaius Baltar in the Battlestar Galactica reboot? I looked it up and no, that was James Callis. But James Sallis turns out to be a well-known neo-noir writer, I like noir in its many varieties, and our local library had several of his (nicely short) books, so I checked out Drive and its sequel and a few others.
Halfway through the book after a couple of hours, and I’m liking it a lot. The film is a faithful adaptation, but not slavishly so, which I also like — when both the novelist and the filmmaker are good, I like a decent amount of deviation from the source, I get to hear a story told two ways by two artists. And I like seeing how one work inspired the other, which pieces the adaptor decided to run with and how. It’s why I liked Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein — and why others hated it.
An adaptation that is exactly the opposite, but in a very good way, is The Maltese Falcon. I read Dashiell Hammett’s book after seeing John Huston’s film (his first!) a few times, and was shocked at how exactly the movie followed the book — it was the script! I was even stopped cold by the one very minor deviation, probably needed to skirt the censors. But I didn’t feel cheated at all, instead I was impressed at how Huston had perfectly visualized what Hammett had written.
While I’m here I’ll mention an adaptation-in-reverse I recently experienced, Quentin Tarantino’s “novelization” of his movie Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood. I’ve seen the movie many times, saw that our library had the book. It’s only for Tarantino completists (like me) but as such it’s remarkable. I mean, why did he bother? Except for the fact that he’s rich and successful and can do anything he likes at this point in his career. And the result was definitely worth reading (once). Tarantino does a number of things, like playing with the novelization form (often the writing is deliberately clunky, as novels-based-on-movies-written-for-hire almost always were), shifting his style to match the character when he shifts perspective, adding lots of his trademark how-the-sausage-is-made, fleshing out many of the scenes in the movie … as well as boldly dropping some plot points that made the movie so powerful. A very fun glimpse into Tarantino’s creative process.