Vikas Swarup Quotes

I think my background in film taught me that a great book adaptation is not always slavishly faithful to the source material.

A movie is not a book. If the source material is a book, you cannot be too respectful of the book. All you owe to the book is the spirit.

You either ignore the comic book and make a great movie or you stay very close to the comic book.

I'd like to think that my films are personal enough to exist without hearkening back to their respective novels.

Adapting a novel is not really about being faithful to every word and every moment the author has created. It's more about that same story being filtered through somebody else's sensibility.

I think successful movies that are based on books are their own thing. I think if you're too faithful, word by word, character trait to character trait, it can hurt the movie.

People think, 'Oh, well how can 'The Hobbit,' which is one book, become three films?' But you can take one line from an appendice and it turns into a whole sequence.

You take some creative license when you make a movie, and things can be a little bit different.

I think comics can be the basis for great films, but I think the focus of such a project should be on making the film as good as possible, not on painstakingly replicating the comic.

The best adaptations are the ones that really excavate the material. The movies that work are the ones in which somebody very smart figured out how to take all the thematic material, all the character material, all the filigree, all the beautiful writing and put it into a story.

The language of prose is very different than the language of cinema, so the movie has to successfully translate what was in the book.

Oh, filmmakers, please don't take my soft book and turn it into a horror, or take my horror and make it soft.

Most writers are unhappy with film adaptations of their work, and rightly so. 'Field of Dreams,' however, caught the spirit and essence of 'Shoeless Joe' while making the necessary changes to make the work more visual.

As an author, you can't expect a movie to be an illustration of the book. If that's what you hope for, you shouldn't sell the rights.

Unfortunately, the author of a book pretty much gives up control of the story when the producers take over a book to make it into a movie.

Authors of books are not given very much control over the films that are made from their books.

The great thing about Stephen is that he sees the movie as a separate thing, I think. He wants it to capture the essence of the book, and if he feels that's been done, then he's not too particular about the details. I think that's why he's happy.

I don't tend to be a nitpicker when I'm watching movies, so as long as something is true to the spirit of the original, that's very much what we got for. You try to never do something that the original author wouldn't have done themselves.

I'm also a huge cinephile, and I have witnessed that to honor the book literally word-for-word never makes a good movie.

I always felt once it goes into movie land, the book belongs to someone else.

For 'The Book Thief,' I wanted only one outcome, and that was for the director to follow his own vision, just as I had.

When you haven't met someone, regardless of whether they're an author or not, when you're taking their work, and you are in some way filtering it or interpreting it, of course there's potential for them to feel that you have, in some way, not lived up to what it could have been.

Yeah, when you're making a film, the book is a good tool, but once you have the script and you're making a movie, you have to let go of the book.

There's always a slight tension when you sell a book to Hollywood, especially a nonfiction book. The author wants his story told intact; the nonfiction author wants it told accurately.

An author entices the readers with their words, and it is painful for them to even lose a sentence. But films and books are two different mediums and should be dealt differently. What works in a book might not work for a film. When I saw 'Anna Karenina' on screen, I didn't like it at all, whereas 'The Godfather' was legendary.