Best Film Adaptations That Ignore the Book

Hitchcock reveals information earlier than the source novel and shifts the emphasis from solving a mystery to watching obsession take over. The result is a more disturbing film about looking and control.

Coppola uses the framework of Heart of Darkness but moves the journey into the Vietnam War. The change makes American military power, not colonial distance, the madness at the center.

Kubrick discards much of Stephen King's psychology and makes the Overlook Hotel feel cold, geometric and unknowable. The adaptation works by becoming a different kind of horror story.

Tarkovsky keeps the dangerous journey into the Zone but removes most of Roadside Picnic's science-fiction explanation. The stripped story becomes a philosophical test of desire, faith and trust.

Paul Thomas Anderson draws mainly from the early oil chapters of Upton Sinclair's novel, then invents a rivalry between an oilman and a preacher. That departure creates an entirely new American tragedy.

Ridley Scott and the screenwriters leave much of Philip K. Dick's plot behind and build a noir around memory, labor and artificial life. The film's images changed science fiction on screen.

Park moves Fingersmith to colonial Korea and reorganizes the perspectives and final act. The changes make language, occupation and property central to the deception.

Jonathan Glazer removes the novel's explanations and follows an alien woman through real Scottish streets. The reduced plot creates a more unsettling study of bodies, looking and human behavior.

Paul Verhoeven exaggerates the militarism of Robert Heinlein's novel into fascist propaganda presented at blockbuster speed. The straight-faced tone lets the film satirize its own surface pleasures.

Charlie Kaufman turns his inability to adapt The Orchid Thief into the plot of the screenplay. The failure becomes a funny, anxious film about authorship and Hollywood storytelling rules.