Adaptation

By Pierre Lachaine

Warren Wilensky rubs his chin and stares at his computer screen. Jumping up, he walks past his unplugged phone and paces up and down the hallway. He steps outside for a smoke and trudges back into his bedroom/office. He rearranges the cue cards pasted to the wall above his bed and sits back down at his desk.

Wilensky was commissioned two years ago to adapt the novel Home Ground by Lynn Freed into a screenplay. Freed tried her hand at the adaptation but she had mixed results. A Los Angeles based company bought the rights and approached filmmaker/ writer/director Wilensky, who’d never adapted before, with the project.

Adapting a novel into a screenplay can be a frustrating process. An unplugged phone can be the only relief from curious producers and authors waiting to criticize your work.

Wilensky, who came to Canada seven years ago, was perfect for the job. He could relate to the book – the story of a family growing up in South African apartheid society.

“After reading the book, there was a definite connection with the work,” he says, “which helps because you can transpose your own life story onto it.”

He prepared himself by reading up on adapting novels. He was particularly impressed by Linda Seger’s book, The Art of Adaptation: Turning Fact and Fiction into Film.

He also analyzed Freed’s initial screenplay to see what she had done wrong.

“She was caught up in flashbacks,” he says. “She was trying to cover too much time and she kept all the characters of the book in place.”

When Wilensky took over the project, he and Freed decided not to have any contact.

They haven’t spoken once and she hasn’t seen any of the drafts of the script.

The problem, he says, is “we could give it to her to look at and she might like it, but she could hate it and shop it around to someone else.”

Carrie Paupst Shaughnessy, director of the Development House and a screenwriting teacher at the Humber Institute of Technology & Advanced Learning, says the key to writing a good adaptation is realizing how different the two mediums are.

“Films have a much higher level of focus,” she says. “You have a single protagonist with a clear objective.”