Mistborn creator Brandon Sanderson recently shared how his Mistborn film will differ from the novel while discussing what makes a good adaptation.
First, Sanderson shared examples of what he believes are bad adaptations and what are good adaptations and noted that hewing too close to the source material can lead to a bad adaptation.
He said, “I’ve always noticed that certain adaptations that tried too hard to be beat by beat what the book was doing ended up failing.”
Specifically, he pointed to The Golden Compass, “The Golden Compass is not a good film, but it is [an] interesting failure of film because I watched that film and I fully believe that the creators were passionate about the source material. I believe the actors were perfectly cast. I believe that all the work was done for world building that needed to be done and that much passion, that much work, and they tried really hard to stay true to the story and the movie failed.”
”The way I think it failed was in trying to get so much of the book into the film that they essentially had to stop showing and start telling because telling people things is much easier,” he continued. “A voiceover prologue can give you way more information than taking all the time to build up character and have scenes that evoke emotion and whatnot. An The Golden Compass because it had so much ground to cover, has a whole lot of scenes of people just stopping and talking about what’s going on with them because it covers more ground more quickly.”
“They tried, number one, to make The Golden Compass too short. Epic fantasy films need more space to breathe than the time that that film was given. But beyond that, I feel like they tried to do too much. They tried to do too much of the book.”
He then noted he felt similar mistakes were made with the earlier Harry Potter films before they decided to adapt with the third movie, “That’s when they had to say we can’t fit everything that’s in the book into the film so let’s take one concept of the book and make that central and tell that story.”
However, he also notes that it is possible to do straight adaptations and he referenced the early seasons of Game of Thrones, “Game of Thrones early seasons are in some instances like scene by scene the books.”
Next, he referenced Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings and how it combined, streamlined, and moved a number of scenes. “[An adaptation] does have to do what Peter Jackson did, which is know what story it’s telling.”
After all of this, Sanderson shared how he’s applying it to the Mistborn screenplay he’s currently writing, “A film needs to hit a central idea. And as I’ve been working on the Mistborn films myself, this has been one of the key things I’ve realized. The Mistborn, the book, can divide its time between Kelsier and Vin, between the heist and her coming of age story. And all of that will be in the movie. But the movie needs to know what it's telling. And this movie is telling Vin's story. And so I want to reframe all of that for a tighter narrative looking at her story.”
”But what I found is I can take almost every scene from the book and I can bring them in and use them in some way,” he added.
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