Shakti' is a very loose adaptation of 'Not Without My Daughter.'
If you write an original, it's like you went in and dug a well, and you hit oil. But an adaptation, it's like the oil well's on fire, and they bring you in to put the fire out and get it working again - or something like that.
Working on an adaptation is not as satisfying, because it's not your original work: you're interpreting. With 'L.A. Confidential,' I loved the book. In that case, I felt I was guardian of the work, staying as true to the novel as I could. I've since met the novelist, and he loves the movie and the script.
I've always been open to the idea of an adaptation that does its own thing, that freely diverges from the original as long as it's true to the spirit.
Since my adaptation of Ian McEwan's 'Atonement,' I get sent a lot of novels that people think will work as movies. So every now and then I make a point of sitting down and reading a couple of them.
To me, the ultimate crime in an adaptation is the crime of reverence. A novel is one form of media, a screenplay is another, and a movie is yet another. There's even reverence to a screenplay.
There are no large-scale original musicals being made right now. They're all Broadway adaptations and jukebox musicals or catalog musicals, and they just don't interest me as much.
The issue of doing an adaptation of a book is the theater of the mind, and so you always face that.
'Troy' is an adaptation of the Trojan War myth in its entirety, not 'The Iliad' alone. 'The Iliad' begins with the quarrel between Achilles and Agamemnon over the slave girl Briseis nine years into the war. The equivalent scene occurs halfway through my script.
Every adaptation requires that the screenwriter make difficult choices - and in particular, difficult cuts.
