Books, camera, action!

A muffled gasp wafted out of the cinema hall as a Pomeranian flew out of the window of a high-rise building. A member of the audience at the Delhi premiere of Sacred Games , watching the dog plummet to its death on screen, couldn’t contain her excitement. “This is exactly like the book,” she exclaimed. The opening scene certainly was. India’s first original series on Netflix was adapted from Vikram Chandra’s 2006 novel of the same name. It began: “A white Pomeranian named Fluffy flew out of a fifth floor window in Panna...”

The rest of the series wasn’t exactly like the book as scriptwriters Varun Grover, Smita Singh and Vasant Nath made significant changes while adapting the novel to the screen. Directed by Anurag Kashyap and Vikramaditya Motwane under the banner of Phantom Films, the series received an overwhelmingly positive response from critics and audiences alike — driving home the point that you can’t stop a good story told well from succeeding.

Not an outlier

The commercial success of recent book-to-screen adaptations, such as Raazi , which was based on Harinder Sikka’s novel Calling Sehmat , is not an exception, given how many prominent production houses in the Hindi film industry are involved with screen adaptations of novels. Among the upcoming films adapted from books are the Aamir Khan-starrer Thugs of Hindostan , based on the 1839 novel Confessions of a Thug by Philip Meadows Taylor, and The Zoya Factor , based on Anuja Chauhan’s novel of the same name. Sagarika Ghose’s Indira: India’s Most Powerful Prime Minister and Manu Joseph’s Serious Men have been bought by film studios and are currently in development.

With the entry of online streaming services — Netflix, Hotstar and Amazon Prime, among others — in the world of Indian entertainment, there is an increasing demand for fresh, original storytelling rooted in India with a universal appeal. In the search for compelling stories that could be made into equally compelling cinema, filmmakers and producers are now turning to their bookshelves to see what magic the pages hold.

Forerunners in the market

Anticipating this unprecedented need for content, the Mumbai Academy of the Moving Image (MAMI), a public trust that organises the annual Mumbai International Film Festival, initiated a platform in 2015 called the Word to Screen Market. The platform, which hosted its third edition in Mumbai last week, brings the publishing and film industries together.

Master raconteur: Shyam Benegal played a critical role in adapting fiction for television in the ’80s

“Book-to-screen adaptations have happened in a sporadic way in India, but this is not to say that it hasn’t happened,” says the curator of Word to Screen Market, Arpita Das, who is also the publisher at Yoda Press.

Literature, for instance, has for long been the mainstay of regional cinema. But Das points out that on television, too, filmmakers such as Shyam Benegal and Sandip Ray have relied on books for their source material. “In the ’80s, television programmes such as Katha Sagar featured excellent adaptations of Indian as well as global literature,” she adds.

Directed by Benegal, Katha Sagar was aired on DD National in 1986 and featured adaptations of stories by Anton Chekhov, O Henry and Guy de Maupassant, in addition to the works of Indian writers. Shankar Nag’s adaptation of RK Narayan’s Malgudi Days was aired the same year. Sandip Ray’s Feluda films were based on detective novels written by his father, Satyajit Ray, whose Hindi film Shatranj Ke Khilari was based on a Munshi Premchand short story. Other memorable adaptations for the big screen include Junoon (based on Ruskin Bond’s A Flight Of Pigeons ), Vijay Anand’s Guide (adapted from Narayan’s original), and, earlier still, the many versions of Sarat Chandra’s Devdas .

There was a lull in literary adaptations around the ’90s, Das points out. Those were tumultuous times in India with the liberalisation of the economy, the rise of private capital and the reframing of the citizen as consumer. With the advent of satellite television, new ideas emerged on what constituted popular entertainment in Bollywood.

“It is only after Vishal Bhardwaj’s adaptations of Shakespeare’s stories that we see a slow return to literature,” she says. The director turned Macbeth into Maqbool in 2003, and later adapted Omkara from Othello and Haider from Hamlet . “We are in another tumultuous moment at present where the opening up of the digital streaming platforms has created such a rush for new stories that filmmakers are finally looking at literature that is already available,” she adds.

Adapting to Hollywood

Elsewhere in the world, literature has long been the foundation of cinema. In Hollywood, for instance, adaptations are not just common, they are also reliably bankable. In 2017, six of the nine Oscar contenders for Best Picture were adaptations. The winner was Moonlight , which was based on the play In Moonlight Black Boys Look Blue by Tarell Alvin McCraney.

The opening up of the streaming platforms in Hollywood has also led to a tremendous increase in the number of shows that are adaptations. Among the most popular are HBO’s Game of Thrones , based on George RR Martin’s fantasy novel A Song of Ice and Fire , while Amazon Prime’s The Man In The High Castle is adapted from Philip K Dick’s sci-fi novel, and Hulu’s The Handmaid’s Tale is based on Margaret Atwood’s chilling classic.

Part of the appeal of these immensely popular shows is that they are not mere reproductions of the original text — rather, while they retain its essential elements, the creators take imaginative leaps in the story-telling format, stretching out parts that are particularly dramatic, and thereby ensuring the viewers remain hooked to the visual spectacle as well as a crisp script. This is, in part, enabled by the long format of the series, where stories no longer need to be told within the screen time of two hours or so. With people increasingly changing their viewing habits from watching a show at a mandated broadcast hour or a particular time slot at the cinema to binge-watching hours of content at a time, producers of shows are competing for their attention through innovative and original storytelling.

For the big screen, of course, the relationship between the two industries is an abiding one. In Hollywood, often even before a book is written, its synopsis is pitched to a film studio, or the film rights of a popular author’s new book are grabbed by producers even before the first word has been penned. “The publishing and film industries in Hollywood have had very close relationships for decades because of adaptations, so there are systems in place that make adaptation the norm rather than the exception,” says Labyrinth Literary Agency founder Anish Chandy, who was representing several publishers at the Mumbai event.

Das, who had organised an interaction with Torino Film Lab’s Isabelle Fauvel in a previous edition of the Word to Screen Market, points out how Fauvel has set up an adaptation lab. The platform is not just an interface between authors and filmmakers for converting a book into a script, it also helps a producer find relevant locales for a film.

“This is the way forward, as I see it,” she says. “Someone who knows both the worlds of films and books can helm such a lab, train writers to write for the screen and implement certain standards in the way adaptations happen in India.”

Playing matchmaker

In India, efforts are on to foster a relationship between the publishing and filmmaking industries. The Word to Screen Market seeks to provide a venue for publishers and filmmakers to talk about adapting books.

“The publishing industry is largely based in Delhi and the film industry has its base in Mumbai. In America, though the publishing industry is in New York and the film world is in Los Angeles, there are strong links between the two of them since there are a lot of back-and-forth conversations on books, manuscripts being sold to studios, adaptations and so on,” says MAMI director Anupama Chopra. “So we were thinking — can we make these conversations happen here?”

This year, the MAMI-supported body received 174 book entries from publishers, which were then whittled down to 36 by a selection committee. Of these, 25 were fiction titles and the rest, non-fiction. Representatives of the selected books were then invited to interact with filmmakers. The entries spanned books in Assamese, Bengali, Gujarati, Malayalam, Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Marathi and Kannada, in addition to English.

“Narratives in Indian languages and literature in translation are finally finding their place in the sun,” says Das, who spearheaded the expansion of the book lists to include regional languages. “If filmmakers are looking for stories that hold up a mirror to socio-political realities in India, then regional literature is where they will find it depicted with honesty and authenticity.”

Making a mark: Meghna Gulzar’s film Raazi is an adaptation of Harinder Sikka’s 2008 novel Calling Sehmat

The many kinds of writing

But a good book does not necessarily turn into an equally good film. “There are all kinds of stumbling blocks along the way from a book to an adaptation — good screenwriting is one of them,” says filmmaker Kiran Rao, who is also the chairperson of MAMI. “We get a lot of scripts, but we rarely find quality writing. Writing for the screen is a completely different discipline and process from the writing you do for a book.”

This aspect of adaptation is explained in detail by the prominent Malayalam author M Mukundan, whose novels have been converted into films, notably Daivathinte Vikrithikal , which received the Kerala State Film Award for the Best Film in 1992. After one of his novels was adapted into a film that he terms “a disaster”, he took it upon himself to write the scripts for the film versions of his books. He realised just how divergent the two kinds of writing were.

“In books, a lot of character development and narrative space is taken up by the internal conversations and thought processes of the characters. You can’t show these processes on screen, so you’ll have to think around that when writing for a film,” he says. “You also can’t replicate the specific ways in which novels play with time and memory, because everything in the script is in the present tense.” Mukundan is currently working on the script for the adaptation of his short story ‘Autorickshaw-kaarante Bhaarya’, slated to be directed by Harikumar of the Malayalam film industry.

The need for sharp writing for film is echoed by the Bajrangi Bhaijaan director Kabir Khan, who recently wrapped up the filming of his Amazon Prime Original series The Forgotten Army , on Subhas Chandra Bose. “In Hollywood, they have a great pool of screenplay writers who are trained to look for the film in a book. We haven’t nurtured that kind of talent here, which is why you keep hearing about books being picked up for adaptation and nothing coming of it,” he says.

Khan believes the screenplay is where the will to make a film out of a book unravels. “First, there’s the brevity problem, of compressing 1,000 pages of a book into 120 pages of a script. How do you adapt it for a new audience and medium without losing the essence of the original? This is a skill-set we just don’t have enough of,” he argues.

Pitch perfect

Apart from the writing, there are other aspects of adaptation that requires fine-tuning in India — for example, the way publishers pitch their books to filmmakers. A previous edition of the Word to Screen Market held a Publishers’ Bootcamp to familiarise executives in publishing with the kind of pitches required by the film industry.

Smriti Kiran, the creative director at MAMI, is emphatic about the power of a well-defined pitch to a filmmaker who is going through a dozen scripts a day.

“Don’t tell us about the book idea. Rather, tell us about the film it could be,” she says. “Don’t underestimate the power of a strong cover image and compelling blurb. These go a long way in the journey from book to screen.”

Labyrinth’s Chandy, who made pitches to filmmakers for Duckbill, Hachette, Yoda Press, Srishti, Anita Nair and others, is uncertain if systems and standards can come into play into the adaptation market at such an early stage.

“Right now, the two industries are figuring each other out. We are all buying and selling our biases. If someone likes literary fiction, it makes no sense to pitch noir to them. So it’s not just about a good pitch, but also about whom you are pitching to, and what they are looking for,” he explains. He, however, believes the market is going to expand and evolve in ways that can’t be foreseen at present.

His optimistic outlook bears fruit during the two-day Mumbai event. Chandy, at lunch and in conversation with BL ink , absent-mindedly muses on a book that he hopes will get picked up by a production house — but hasn’t. About five minutes later, a harried yet excited Kiran Rao approaches him at the table to ask if the book has been taken. Chandy says it hasn’t. “Good, because I want it,” Rao says, as she leaves her contact details with him and heads out.

Chandy smiles and shrugs. “Sometimes that’s all there is to it,” he says.

At the end of the day, the real winner of these negotiations is the viewer, for whom the literature and film worlds combine to bring out diverse and original narratives in new formats.

If shortcomings in adaptations of novels have led loyal and irked readers to complain that “the book was better”, then the film and publishing industries are both working hard to make them say, “Maybe not, after all”.

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