A yearning for better times ... director George Miller.
Australia's film industry is not in terminal decline but it needs urgent treatment, George Miller tells Garry Maddox.
A more aggressive approach to film financing, more creative training, more emphasis on film culture and slowing the erosion of Australia's identity.
If Dr George Miller was diagnosing the Australian film industry, these would be part of his presciption. The influential filmmaker, whose medical shifts helped support him and his late partner Byron Kennedy while making the first Mad Max movie, has made a rare assessment of the industry ahead of the Australian Film Institute awards on Friday.
As befitting one of the country's most successful directors and producers, Miller's comments are insightful and thoughtful rather than just an appeal for more government funding.
Asked about the tough year for the industry, the three-time Oscar nominee said the problems were very deep. "I really feel we're fiddling while Rome burns," he said before detailing the issues facing the country's filmmakers in competing with the world's best.
It was no accident, for instance, that America dominated the film business. "They understand how important it is to push their culture through the moving image culture. We don't really understand that very much."
When adapting a book, screenwriters have some horror stories
By Lewis Beale September 28, 2008
"BLINDNESS," Nobel Prize-winner Jose Saramago's 1997 allegorical novel about an epidemic of sightlessness that threatens to destroy society, is told in a stream-of-consciousness style that reads like a fever dream. Not exactly "Harry Potter," straight-to-the-big-screen material
Yet, Don McKellar saw in it a screenplay and Fernando Meirelles ("City of God") saw in that screenplay a film he could direct. And the fact that "Blindness" is now multiplex fodder, with the film opening Friday, is a testament to the willingness of moviemakers to tackle -- sometimes against great odds -- some of the toughest literary works.
"The more successful the work of art is in the medium for which it was originally created, the more it's going to resist a translation into another medium," says writer-director Nicholas Meyer, whose adaptation of the Philip Roth novel "The Dying Animal" was recently filmed as the Ben Kingsley movie "Elegy."
"The better the book, the harder it's going to be to find a cinematic equivalent and the more important it is that you should" be able to make an equivalent, Meyer says. "If you try 'The Brothers Karamazov,' " he says in a reference to a less-than-stellar 1958 film adaptation, "and you don't bring it off, you have to go to movie jail."
In other words, conventional wisdom is that pop novels make better movies because, says Joe Penhall, who wrote the screenplay for a film version of Cormac McCarthy's bestseller "The Road," slated for a Nov. 14 release, "pot-boilers motor on plot and story, and film loves plot and story."
In a pop novel, "the emphasis is on narrative," Meyer adds, "and if something is pure narrative, it may be a movie traveling under another name. What you are looking for in a book is how to find not the movie but a movie that could be extracted from the book in question. If it is narrative, that's easier than if the novel has complex thematic or linguistic elements to it."
Take "The Godfather": pop-junk novel, masterful, epic movie. Or "Gone With the Wind": not exactly a literary classic but a bang-up film. And all those detective novels like "The Maltese Falcon" and "The Big Sleep." This doesn't mean there haven't been successful literary adaptations -- "The Grapes of Wrath," "Oliver Twist" and "Sense and Sensibility" are prime examples -- it's just that cinema history is littered with failed attempts to adapt great works. Like the overblown 1965 film version of "Lord Jim," with Peter O'Toole; the bears-almost-no-relation-to-the-source-material 2002 remake of H.G. Wells' "The Time Machine," with Guy Pearce; or 2007's gorgeously produced but leaden film version of "Love in the Time of Cholera."
Ten Novels and Short Stories That Would Make Good Movies
By Maud Newton
Adapting fiction for the screen has always been a tricky endeavor. For every "Apocalypse Now," "The Big Sleep" or "Rebecca," there are scores of butchered classics and box office duds, and in recent years, Hollywood has only continued to perfect its reverse-alchemy process, transforming narrative gold into the dullest, heaviest lead, topped off with a giant packet of saccharine.
For details, see Roland Joffe's "The Scarlet Letter," featuring a pearl-bedecked, shiny-bodiced, utterly vacuous Hester Prynne, or the soul-sucking "Love in the Time of Cholera," which drove the Guardian's John Patterson to call for a ban on the making of all movies based on books. It's easy to sympathize. We're talking, after all, about the machine that reduced Heller's brilliantly satirical "Notes on a Scandal" -- a teacher's obsessive chronicle of her female colleague's affair with her young male student -- to a cautionary tale with all the subtlety of "Fatal Attraction."
Still, the best fiction can offer what most industry vehicles don't: a compelling narrative, vivid characters, surprising but realistic plot twists -- and sometimes all three. It's hard not to imagine how "The Secret History" and "A Confederacy of Dunces" would play out as films, had they not gotten sucked into the black hole of pre-production. Some books -- like Cormac McCarthy's "No Country for Old Men," so stripped-down novelistically, it tended to read like stage directions -- actually work better on screen.
Julian Jarrold recently took his own cinematic run at Evelyn Waugh's magnum opus "Brideshead Revisited," contending with not only the daunting original text but the beloved 1981 miniseries. Amid all the reviews and speculation, I've been thinking about novels and short stories I'd like to see adapted. Ten of my top picks are below. Add your own wish list in the comments.
Infiltrate Saddam Hussein’s brutal regime through the story of one of his most loyal aides. Wendell Steavenson spent five years with General Kamel Sachet and his family, slowly uncovering a man torn by his own conscience, a wife lost to her sense of duty, and sons whose frightful fanaticism grows increasingly dangerous. A current, compassionate, and honest book, The Weight of a Mustard Seed explores the emotional side of the current conflict in Iraq.
2. The Period Piece — The Other Queen With every Tudor formula already tried and tested, it’s time to discover those other salacious Royals: the Stuarts. After being forced out of her land, Mary, Queen of Scots takes refuge in England, kingdom of her Protestant cousin Elizabeth. But her new home is not quite fit for a queen, as the charismatic Catholic is kept under the close guard of Elizabeth’s cunning advisers. Author of the bestselling, The Other Boleyn Girl, Philippa Gregory again delivers her irresistible brand of historical fact and corseted scandal.
3. The Blockbuster — Next Humans and chimpanzees differ in only 2% of their DNA. Is that why an adult human resembles a chimp fetus? And should that worry us? Welcome to the fast, furious world of genetics. This is not the world of the future — it’s the world of now. The late Michael Crichton has already brought us Jurassic Park and The Andromeda Strain. Now, he delves into a new world where nothing is as it seems, and where your sense of reality is challenged at every turn. Genetic change is closer than you think. Get used to it.
4. The Foreign Film — First Darling of the Morning Acclaimed journalist Thrity Umrigar paints a colorful picture of her childhood in Bombay, with an emotionally detached and abusive mother, an overly-docile father, and a loving aunt who is a substitute for both. Vivid details of Indian culture, history, and politics make this book an all-rounder, as readers (and potential viewers) feast on the sights and sounds of India’s most cosmopolitan city, and the fragile characters that inhabit it.
2. The Period Piece —