Author: montage

Alfonso studied film in the UNAM in Mexico. It was there where he met Emmanuel Lubezki, arguably one of the best cinematographers ever, and a recurrent collaborator of Cuarón. A few years later he directed several episodes for La Hora Marcada, now considered a cult show in Mexico, and it was during this time where his enduring friendship with Guillermo del Toro started.

Altogether with Lubezki, Del Toro, and González Iñárritu, Cuarón stands out as one of the main representatives of a truly golden generation of Mexican filmmakers. A single film directed in his homeland was enough to pique the interest of Hollywood producers, and pretty soon he went on to direct his first feature films in English language. He has alternated languages during his career, earning the respect of international reviewers with meaningful melodramas (Y tu Mamá También, Roma) and action/fantasy flicks (Pan’s Labyrinth, Gravity).

Cuarón is undoubtedly a great storyteller with a knack both for emotional narrative and stunning visuals. The tracking shot has become one of his trademarks as a director, as exemplified in the spectacular car chase and the final uprising in Children of Men.

(1991) Solo con tu Pareja

(1995) A Little Princess

(1998) Great Expectations

(2001) Y tu Mamá También

(2004) Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban

(2006) Children of Men

(2013) Gravity

(2018) Roma

Born and raised in Wisconsin, he obtained his bachelor’s in film in the UCLA. After some minor hits (Bad Influence, Death Becomes Her), in which Koepp already proved his ability to combine audience-pleasing action with a solid plot, he was chosen by Steven Spielberg to write Jurassic Park.

Koepp has become one of Hollywood’s preferred go-to writers ever since, especially for big budget adaptations (The Lost World, Spider-Man, Angels and Demons). He has collaborated repeatedly with some of the most commercially successful directors of the last decades, including Ron Howard, Robert Zemeckis, Brian DePalma, and of course Spielberg among others.

His knack for showiness and entertainment is complemented by his flexibility as a writer: he has provided quality scripts for a wide variety of genres, occupying the director’s chair in some occasions as well with moderate success (The Trigger Effect, A Stir of Echoes, Ghost Town), and created the TV series Hack. He will return to his Spielberg partnership for the fifth time as the screenwriter of the last Indiana Jones installment.

(1988) Apartment Zero
(1990) Bad Influence
(1991) Toy Soldiers
(1992) Death Becomes Her
(1993) Jurassic Park
(1993) Carlito’s Way
(1994) The Paper
(1994) The Shadow
(1996) Mission: Impossible
(1996) The Trigger Effect
(1997) The Lost World: Jurassic Park
(1998) Snake Eyes
(1999) Stir of Echoes
(2002) Panic Room
(2002) Spider-Man
(2004) Secret Window
(2005) War of the Worlds
(2005) Zathura
(2008) Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull
(2008) Ghost Town
(2009) Angels and Demons
(2011) The Little Engine that Could
(2012) Premium Rush
(2014) Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit
(2015) Mortdecai
(2016) Inferno

We are all used to seeing bestsellers consistently adapted to the big screen, and the line ‘I wish they made a movie out of this’ has become something almost granted, as we know it won’t be long until a major studio decides to make profit out of the latest literary phenomenon. However, some filmmakers have gone one step beyond and tried to adapt more obscure titles; even books that nearly everybody thought were impossible to adapt.

Some authors are known for writing with a particularly complex, deep, or metaphysical prose, which makes their works difficult to be narrated by using the more visual elements of cinema. Such is the case of William Faulkner, Joseph Conrad, William Burroughs, and others.

Yet this didn’t stop some notably daring filmmakers to bring their work to the big screen. The reception to this kind of retellings tends to be mixed, while this has also produced some undeniably unique films.

In other cases, the filmmakers have taken just a few elements from a book to produce a story that echoes themes of the source material, but has all the strength and personality of a tale anew that stands on its own. This is what Paul Thomas Anderson did in There Will Be Blood, loosely based in the novel Oil! by John Updike, while Woody Allen wrote and directed a hilarious parody of a sexuality essay with Everything You’ve Always Wanted to Know About Sex.

These are some notable examples of film scripts that have adapted unusual or obscure literature:

(1960) Psycho

(1972) Everything You’ve Always Wanted to Know About Sex

(1979) Apocalypse Now

(1988) Who Framed Roger Rabbit?

(1990) Dick Tracy

(1991) Naked Lunch

(1993) Short Cuts

(1996) Trainspotting

(2002) Adaptation

(2003) American Splendor

(2006) Tristram Shady: A Cock-and-Bull Story

(2009) Fantastic Mr. Fox

(2012) Cosmopolis

(2012) Cloud Atlas

(2014) Inherent Vice

Once an acclaimed CBS TV series, a quarter of a century would have to pass for Mission: Impossible to have its first feature film adaptation. It did so under the guidance of Brian DePalma and with a script that gathered top-notch names in screenwriting: Steven Zaillan, Robert Towne and David Koepp.

The film was criticized for focusing on ‘stylish’ action sequences in a way the original series didn’t, but the script still had a clever treatment of intrigue and mind games that resembled more the spirit of the show. Coupled with great performances by Tom Cruise and Jon Voigt, M:I was successful enough as to make Paramount consider the possibility of a sequel.

Despite an evident drop of quality in its second installment, young director and producer JJ Abrams managed to convince audiences and reviewers alike with the notable Mission:Impossible III. Brad Bird delivered a very entertaining flick with Ghost Protocol and then Christopher McQuarrie, perhaps one of the best American screenwriters of our time, returned a bit to the convoluted schemes of the first installment with Rogue Nation and, very recently, Fallout.

Tom Cruise has remained loyal to the saga all throughout, providing a very effective and charismatic driving force that has been paired with popular names in both the direction and writing departments. M:I is arguably the most successful espionage movie franchise altogether with James Bond, and a phenomenal proof that story quality can be retained through a long running commercial series.

(1996) Mission: Impossible

(2000) Mission: Impossible 2

(2006) Mission: Impossible 3

(2011) Mission: Impossible Ghost Protocol

(2015) Mission: Impossible Rogue Nation

(2018) Mission: Impossible Fallout

Spoof films work in a similar way as pastiches do in other arts, with the exception that they try to mock other films rather than celebrating them. Ever since Chaplin created one of the most daring and influential satires in film history with The Great Dictator, these parodies have evolved and acquired an increasingly absurd tone – the goal is not so much producing a coherent plot as it is about helping our brains to switch off for a time and granting us good, unconcerned laughs in the process.

Mel Brooks found his voice as a comedian with celebrated spoof movies like The Producers, Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein. These films display a pretty clever absurdity, as they identify many of the typical tropes in western, horror, and other genres, and bring it to a territory where the audience is granted a new perspective on elements they are very familiar with.

Nobody defined the thin line between satire and parody as Vladimir Nabokov: “Satire is a lesson, parody is a game.” Most of the films often labeled as spoof make a habit of breaking the fourth wall, presenting the movie as an entity aware of itself and interacting with the audience in unexpected moments.

Many films in this genre have been accused of lacking focus and relying excessively on lowbrow humor, but still there are plenty examples of spoof scripts that have shown brilliant creativity and uniqueness in their humor, and have left quotes and gags whose hilarity has remained intact over the decades.

These are some of the best spoof/satire movie scripts:

(1940) The Great Dictator

(1948) Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein

(1967) The Producers

(1969) Support Your Local Sheriff

(1974) Monty Python and the Holy Grail

(1974) Blazing Saddles

(1974) Young Frankenstein

(1979) Life of Brian

(1980) Airplane!

(1984) This is Spinal Tap

(1984) Top Secret!

(1987) Spaceballs

(1991) Naked Gun 2 1/2: The Smell of Fear

(1991) Hot Shots!

(1999) Galaxy Quest

(2004) Team America: World Police

(2004) Shaun of the Dead

Though he was born in London, he spent most of his teenage years travelling all around Europe and Asia, which served as inspiration for his first novel. The Beach became an instant phenomenon among young European readers, and was promptly adapted by popular British director Danny Boyle with Leonardo DiCaprio as the lead.

Garland, who was just 26 at the time he published his first novel, had plenty of artistic ambitions that didn’t confine themselves to literature. Shortly after his first collaboration with Boyle, he would start writing screenplays – the first of which, 28 Days Later, became a modern horror classic, and he would collaborate once again with Boyle for a notable incursion in science fiction with Sunshine.

Garland is one of the best examples of the influence of nerd culture in today’s art. His broad knowledge of fantasy, sci-fi, gaming, literature, and comic-books have paved the way for his very particular niche, working as a writer in both films and video games, and recently switching to the director’s chair with two acclaimed titles: Ex Machina and Annihilation. He is also an avid traveller, especially backpacking.

(2000) The Beach (based on a novel by)

(2002) 28 Days Later

(2003) Tesseract (based on a novel by)

(2007) Sunshine

(2010) Never Let Me Go

(2012) Dredd

(2014) Ex Machina

(2018) Annihilation

As it happens with all kinds of adaptations, changing the elements of a story is risky, but it can also lead to very interesting results.

Adapting a movie into another language, market and setting is a practice more common in screenwriting than some suspect – and sadly, there are occasions in which the general audience never even learns that they are watching an adaptation from a foreign work.

Even some of the most reputed filmmakers have occasionally transitioned from creators to adaptators in this sense, as did Martin Scorsese when he adapted the 2002 Hong Kong film Internal Affairs into a brilliant script written by William Monahan (The Departed, 2006). Others, like Quentin Tarantino, have defined their careers by paying constant tribute to cinematic universes whose uniqueness and exoticness captivated them.

True enough, these adaptations are often turned into mere attempts of exploiting a formula – again, this is what seems to happen with other kinds of adaptations as well.

But we also have plenty of examples of filmmakers adapting a fellow director’s creation with respect and creativity enough as to produce something equally unique and memorable:

(1959) Some Like It Hot
(from the French film Fanfare d’amour)

(1960) The Magnificent Seven
(from Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai)

(1965) The Sound of Music
(from the German film Die Trapp-Familie)

(1992) Scent of a Woman
(from the Italian film Profumo di donna)

(1993) The Vanishing
(from the Dutch film Spoorloos)

(1994) True Lies
(from the French film La Totale!)

(1995) Twelve Monkeys
(from the French short film La Jetée)

(2002) Insomnia
(from the Norwegian film of the same title)

(2006) The Departed
(from the Hong Kong film Internal Affairs)

(2007) Funny Games
(from the German film of the same title)

(2010) Let Me In
(from the Swedish film Låt den rätte komma in)

(2012) Contraband
(from the Icelandic film Reykjavík-Rotterdam)

Can a remake actually surpass the original? In the seventh art, the question has been debated forever; and though some people may associate terms like ‘remake’ or ‘reboot’ to a contemporary sign of lack of creativity, truth is directors and screenwriters have been consistently adapting other films for decades.

As a matter of fact, many have retold their own stories. Hitchcock thought that his first The Man Who Knew Too Much was an amateurish work, so he changed the setting and some plot elements in his 1956 remake. And directors such as Michael Haneke (Funny Games) and Michael Mann (Heat) returned to their old scripts with bigger budgets and A-list casts.

Sometimes, necessities of international markets are the seed of these remakes: Kurosawa saw his work adapted several times in the American industry (The Magnificent Seven, A Fistful of Dollars).

In other instances, filmmakers feel curious about bringing their own vision and methods into a popular classic story, as Herzog did with Nosferatu, Cronenberg with The Fly, and the Coen brothers with True Grit.

There are plenty of examples of film remakes that have proved to be more than just a commercial gimmick.

Here are some of them:

(1956) The Man Who Knew Too Much

(1960) The Magnificent Seven

(1978) Invasion of the Body Snatchers

(1982) The Thing

(1983) Scarface

(1986) The Fly

(2001) Ocean’s Eleven

(2002) The Quiet American

(2002) Insomnia

(2004) Dawn of the Dead

(2005) Pride and Prejudice

(2006) The Departed

(2006) Casino Royale

(2007) 3:10 to Yuma

(2010) True Grit