[AlexandrB]

This take reminds me of how Stephen King considers Kubrick's The Shining a terrible film[1]. I had the misfortune of accidentally renting the Stephen King approved The Shining miniseries[2], and I have to say - it's worse in every way: slow, plodding, and forgettable. I can't comment how either compares to the book - I've never read it - but the Kubrick version is the superior film.

This is all a long way of saying that faithfulness to the source material is overrated in film. Some written works just don't work well when closely adapted to the screen. A few notable movies even manage to twist the original to express a completely different idea or theme (e.g. Starship Troopers). The original author is not some ultimate authority regarding the meaning of a work.

[1] https://faroutmagazine.co.uk/why-stephen-king-hated-stanley-...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shining_(miniseries)

[hnbad]

Stephen King is not a filmmaker. There used to be a running joke that you can judge the quality of a Stephen King adoptation by whether he liked it: if he liked it, it was likely trash; if he didn't, it was likely good.

The problem is that films are not books (shocking, I know) and what works in one medium of storytelling doesn't necessarily work in the other. As in actual translation, there has to be some liberty in how something is adapted from one form into another or else it will be very accurate but not very good.

[jhbadger]

>Stephen King is not a filmmaker.

You haven't seen Maximum Overdrive then. You fortunate, fortunate person.

[Arisaka1]

I see this with anime and manga adaptations all the time, where the studio is trying to capture the inner monologue and action scene that works fine in the manga because it's about how many panels can you use to depict a simple sword dodge. Then the anime adaptation tries to stay so faithful that you end up seeing panels with slight movement, which results in running gags such as "talking is a free action", and Namek's 5 minutes.

[jncfhnb]

I don’t think there’s anything particularly wrong with “talking is a free action” in anime versions of manga. I agree it doesn’t work in live action unless they commit to being stylized in a way that most directors aren’t comfortable.

[WorldMaker]

> Stephen King is not a filmmaker.

Stephen King is a filmmaker because he does have one professional credit as a director. [0] The debate remains that Stephen King is probably not a good filmmaker.

[0] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0091499/?ref_=nm_knf_t_1

[hnbad]

He's a filmmaker in the sense that he has made films. He's not a filmmaker in the sense that he thinks of films as films and understands the art form. You can argue that's enough to technically qualify as a filmmaker but most people would argue that having received professional credit as something once while having made something else your entire career is not the same as that thing being your primary career, even if the English language lacks the appropriate grammatical structures to represent this difference.

[WorldMaker]

English has lots of axes to represent this difference, I offered two in my post:

amateur versus professional: King was paid so he's a professional filmmaker.

bad/unskilled versus good/talented: King showed himself to be a aesthetically bad/unskilled filmmaker.

You are offering a third axis:

"one-off" versus "career": King so far has not made a career of filmmaking and only made the one film.

In English yeah, we do tend to assume the first axis (amateur versus professional) as the "default" axis. I think this is a very useful axis to use as the default: it's the least gatekeeping and the least subjective. Have you been paid anything to do that job? Congratulations, you are a professional at it. You've done the job. Otherwise, you are an amateur, keep trying you'll get there some day.

"one-off"/"career" is an axis with more subjective judgments. (How many films does it take to call it your career? 2? 14? If you deeply and academically study films your whole life but only make one masterpiece, is that not a career effort?) I shouldn't need to explain how good/bad, skilled/unskilled are deeply subjective.

[Tangurena2]

Books and films have different pacing. They each tell slightly different things in different ways. It isn't really possible for a movie to be faithful to the book because one uses images and the other uses words, with every reader making different images inside themselves. It took Dune to get that through to me. I loved the book, but realized it would take a 100 hour long movie to cover what the book covered. Some people hate that movie because it left out so much, or it had to compress things.

I find that I'm less disappointed if I watch the film before I read the book. Frequently because if I read it first, then I always dislike the director's choice of actors. Or their choice of locations. I'm such an annoying critic.

[mock-possum]

Oh read the book please, listen to an audiobook or something. It’s so good. It does such a better job of putting you inside the mind of Jack. The horror of a fundamentally broken man being absolutely devoured by the entity that is the hotel is just… it’s a gigantic story.

[haspok]

Or take Tarkovsky: both Stalker and Solaris are based on books, but only loosely. Stalker, for example, was a short sci-fi / horror story, if I remember correctly, and in the movie this is just a remote backstory, setting the scene to more serious topics and mysticism.

[baerrie]

Stalker is based on Roadside Picnic, basically a scifi novella. Tarkovsky heavily condenses the story to its most basic structure, the story itself is actually a masterpiece in understated commentary on society, class, individual will, and the human response to the unknown. All of this shows up in Tarkovsky’s film albeit in very sparse and intentional ways. As a filmmaker myself, I have realized that to adapt a story into a film it must be radically altered in order to fit the language of cinema because to merely transfer the plot, etc, starts to be more like theater than cinema

[westmeal]

I haven't seen Solaris but Stalker really really sucked.

[youngNed]

I knew if I stuck around the Internet long enough I would find someone who agreed with me. Dear lord, Stalker is an awful film.