Adaptation Risk Quotes

It's quite interesting, looking back at the first one [film about Harry Potter], nobody knew whether or not it was going to be successful as a film. The books were of course already very successful, but that's happened before, where the books were successful and the films weren't at all. But it turned out that they were.

With 100 million people, somebody is using your product in some interesting way. If you change it... you're going to break some use cases.

To rush to throw away your magazine business and move it on the iPad is just sheer insanity and insecurity and fear.

Obviously it's easier when I' m doing the adapting myself. But my feeling is, your potential upside far outweighs the downside. Ultimately, they [moviemakers] can't change your book. Your book remains on the shelf the way you wrote it. If they make a great movie of your book, then you have the equivalent of millions and millions of dollars of advertising for your book. If the movie's not that good, that doesn't mean the book's not good. It doesn't change what you've already written. It has the potential to reach more people.

We're [humans] running great risks of doing things that will not be good for us. The cost can be very high indeed if we reach the point where we can't adapt to our own increasingly rapid adaptations. We run the risk of early extinction. So this certainly isn't a triumphalist story, but it is trying to get at what, in the very long run, leads to the amazing creatures that we are.

I don't make movies. I don't feel that I have to have artistic control. Part of this comes from the fact that the book lives on no matter what Hollywood does to your novel in terms of a film. Now, you try to be careful who you allow to do your film because nobody wants their novel to become a turkey movie. But, on the other hand, it is a crapshot anyway, because even the best people can make a bad film.

I've done quite a few films that are based on books, and it's always nerve-wracking because there's an audience who has read and loved the book, and what if they see the movie and hate it?

Obviously there's a lot more to a TV show than just a book... I think adaptations are a bit tricky for the screenwriters because they're worried about upsetting the author.

It's a scary, exhilarating thing to have your work adapted by someone else. There are so many ways it can go wrong or be a poor example of the underlying story.