What are the hardest elements of a story to get across when adapting it to film?

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Gerald

Well-Known Member
Sep 8, 2011
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The Netherlands
Succesful adaptations that satisfy everyone are not that common, so it remains hard to adapt a story from the written word to the silver screen (or the flatscreen).
What makes it so difficult? For one, there's obviously the fact that everyone's imagination works differently and everyone has different 'favourite bits' in a story, but it seems to go further than that.

Character's motivations seem one of the things that hardest to translate. How often do you not hear the question: 'I didn't get why he/she/they did so and so.' (You hear that even with original stories, not based on another medium.)
In a novel you can have page after page of thoughprocesses, so once a character does something you fully understand why he has come to that point.

Another thing that is hard, is to get the setting exactly right. Unless a lot of money is spent on sets and locations to look identical, the film will be lacking a vital element. People are extremely critical of how the setting looks, even a well-received show like 11.22.63 gets criticism for the cars looking unrealistically brandnew. People will look for anachronisms (they already do that with the book) and in general it's hard to create a place that exactly looks like the one needed and has a similar atmosphere.

What other elements are difficult?
 
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