« “Shawshank” and “The Body” | Home | Big Fish: The Novel vs. The Film »
Hornby’s Update On Film Adaptation of ‘A Long Way Down’
By Matt Margolis | September 11, 2007
A Long Way Down is easily my favorite Nick Hornby novel, and perhaps my all time favorite. Because of this, I am equally excited and worried about the upcoming film adaptation of the book, currently in development. It is encouraging that D.V. Devincentis (who adapted High Fidelity) is writing the script for the movie version of A Long Way Down.
Nick Hornby has given us an update on the movie project on his blog, and explains some of the issue with adapting the novel to a movie script — issues that were actually the same that made me worried about the film version.
I have been told several times that ‘A Long Way Down’ would make a good film. It’s true that in the opening chapters there are four people standing on a roof, and that could be made to look pretty cool on screen. But after that, there are plenty of problems for DV to solve. There are four points of view in the novel, four different voices; you can’t film that. About big chunk of the book is back-story, the characters explaining how they arrived at their current predicament; you can’t film that, either, not without resorting to an excessive, clunky use of flashback. Most of the action takes place in rooms – one climactic scene takes place in a Starbucks basement. (Note to budding novelists: if you really want to make some money out of Hollywood, set all climactic scenes up a mountain, or at the bottom of the sea, or even on the ground floor of Starbucks, somewhere with windows.)
You can read the whole thing here.
Topics: Fiction, Movies, Nick Hornby |
Related Posts:
Comments are closed.