8.16.2011

Book or Film?

Note: This is the first in a series of posts from CoyoteMoon Films people about how they approach the movie-going experience.

If a movie is being made from a book, do you make a point of reading the book first, or do you avoid reading the book before seeing the film? Why?

I do tend to try to read the book first. In the instance of the Hunger Games books I really want to finish the series before the movies come out. I generally do this because I feel that movies have a tendency to leave out important elements. They might not seem important at the time, but they make the story better in the long run. An example of this is in the movie Watchmen. The character Rorschach is a crucial character to the comic and he is written so clearly that he is undeniably the POV character. In the comic they go much more into his childhood, his life as an outsider and the reason his costume is so important to him. All that description might have seem unnecessary in the filmmaking process, but it was actually needed to complete the character. It was unclear at times who the POV character was in the film version and that made the movie long and confusing. Don't get me wrong, I think that the movie was good in its own right, but the characters just felt empty.

This is however not always the case. Very occasionally you run across a movie that is exponentially better than the book. Examples of this would be Dolores Claiborne, Stand By Me (The Body) and The Shawshank Redemption. Had I only read the books I don't think I would have run right out to see the movies. This just proves that if you can get the right people behind a movie they can make cinematic magic out of a mediocre script/novel.

Teresa Skibinski

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