Hubris and the act of filmmaking

A colleague of mine here at work has told me that his 14-year-old daughter is becoming a huge Harry Potter fan. After getting over the fact that she is just now becoming a fan, I asked him if she read the books first, saw the movies first, or kind of combined them.

He laughed and told me that, although she received the complete eight DVD set of the movies for Christmas this year, she has refused to watch any of them until she's finished reading the seven novels.

Great call, I told him. And then I warned him that, while she might really enjoy the first three or four films once she finally watches them, I expect her to be increasingly disappointed in the movies as she gets into the fifth, six and so on. He asked me why.

I was a bit caught off guard. It's not an easy question to answer, especially for someone who doesn't know Harry Potter at all and isn't a student of book-to-film transformations as I believe myself to be. I copped out and chose the easy route, telling him that the later films are merely "highlight reels" of the best action sequences from the books and that they didn't really tell the story at all.

He seemed satisfied with my answer but, the more I think about it, the less I'm happy with what I said.

Why do I so strongly prefer the books to the films? Why do I see the first three, perhaps four films to be much better adaptations of their corresponding novels than the last four movies?

Some of it has to do with length, no doubt. The shorter the book, the easier it is to adapt it faithfully into the film form. I have often said that feature films are really short stories, not novels, so it is a much simpler task to take a 200-page children's novel and bring it to the screen than it is to do the same for a 600-page book.

But I think there are other significant problems as well. To be honest, I think most of those problems stem from the possibility that the movie makers (especially the screenwriter and the director) started to get too comfortable with material in the later films, saw the successs of the flm franchise and started to lose track of the fact that it was J.K. Rowling's story telling, her creativity, her fantastic plots and intersting characters that were responsible for the success of the books and films and thought, instead, that they, themselves, deserved that credit.

As a result, they felt entitled to change Rowling's original works beyond what was necessary to change them from literature into film: they felt they could create new scenes of their own, change characters and their motivations, rewrite the plots completely. This hubris comes to full bloom in the eighth and final book where the filmmakers rewrote the last half of The Deathly Hallows almost completely, in ways that undermined everything that Rowling was tryng to do.

I've written extensively on this blog about how unhappy I am with that eighth film so I won't go into the details but I think it's important to recognise how big a factor the egos of some of the filmmakers could have been in the disappointment of that last film.