Adaptation Controversy Quotes

I always say, I'm certain I changed 'Watchmen' less than the Coen brothers changed 'No Country for Old Men.' I'm certain of it. But you don't hear the Cormac McCarthy fans, like, up in arms about it. They should be. It's like an amazing Pulitzer Prize-winning book.

It's terrible for people when they really love a book and there's an adaptation and they don't like it, because it's almost like you have this personal connection to the original material.

I can't stand it when writers moan about what film-makers might do or have done to their books. There's a very simple answer: don't take the money.

I don't understand it when people get cross about how one of their works was adapted and say, 'Oh, they ruined it!' Well, the book is still there.

Awful film adaptations follow novelists for the rest of their lives. An atrocious movie of 'We Need to Talk About Kevin' could have stigmatised the book, aggrieved the novel's fans, and blighted my reputation forever.

There will be the 5% on the fringe of any hardcore fanbase that get angry about any change you make to the source material. The truth is that novels, games, comics, and what-have-you are not usually ready to be slapped up on screen as-is.

If you work with a subject matter beloved by a hardcore fan base, then there's going to be a huge amount of discussion of what you've got wrong or right. In some ways, you can never please overly obsessive fans; it's just impossible. That doesn't mean to say they're not going to go to the movie and thoroughly enjoy it.

In the 40 years since 'The Amityville Horror', dramatizations of those supposedly-real events have gotten loose enough - special-effects laden enough, star-power re-packaged enough - that the audience no longer trusts the dramatization's loyalty to the core story.

Particularly when you're making a movie of a book, people are always waiting with their knives - you know?