“When you adapt a book, you’re not making another book—you’re making a movie, which operates grammatically very, very differently. The better the book is, the more you have to change it. A good book succeeds with literary effects, but you need cinema so you have to just treat it as raw material. Anyone who expects a movie to be faithful to a book is not really giving the proper respect to cinematic form and literary form.”
Alexander Payne
Interview with Kevin Conroy Scott
Screenwriters’ Masterclass
Note: Payne has won two Oscars for his hand in adapting two scripts from novels; The Descendants (Kaui Hart Hemmings) and Sideways (Rex Pickett).
