Yesterday, I saw Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part Two.  Before you ask, let me say that I loved it.  Although a few liberties were taken, I thought it was exciting and very true to the film franchise.  It was a great translation but, moreover, it was a great finale to the film franchise.  I have felt since Prisoner of Azkaban that the films have separated from their source material and become their own thing.

But enough of my review and the point of this blog post…

Watching the first part of the movie, something occurred to me that I’d felt when I saw Order of Phoenix for the first time: the handling of the material.  It’s easy to say in a narrative “Harry was lonely” or “Harry was really angry at Dumbledore.” It’s not as easy to just show that in a movie.  To really get the point across that someone is lonely it has to be more than just a line in dialogue but a mood carried across in the direction, lighting, music, setting, acting, everything.  The Harry Potter films have always gotten that stuff right on.  Radcliffe’s wonderful acting obviously helps but it’s also the filmmakers.  What they give to us is often something stronger than just an author’s words. Visual imagery when presented with emotional music, strong direction, and excellent acting can often get the storyteller’s intentions across better than mere words. In most of Order of Phoenix the novel, I felt Harry sounded like a pissed-off pompous git.  But in the film, even though he might have said the exact same lines, he came across as instead a frustrated teenager who is being coddled when he wants to fight on the front lines.  I got it.  I got JK Rowling’s intentions through the film translation better than I got it through her own words.

There’s a lot of that in Deathly Hallows.  When Ron, Harry, and Hermione are going from campsite to campsite, the part in the novel seems long and pointless.  Now, as a writer, I understood why JK needed that part.  We can’t have Decisive-Knows-What-To-Do-Next Harry.  That will come.  But, for now, we need Lost-Can’t-Find-His-Way-Isn’t-Sure-What-To-Do-Next Harry.  In the book, it can be a hard part to get through.  In the movie, though, we get the sense of how lonely and lost they are pretty quickly through the fine acting, bleak locales, and music.  It’s handled very, very well.

And becomes a fantastic point about how if the original source material is handled well, you can truly see the power of a good film translation.

I hear from people over and over, “I loved the book more.”  Of course you do.  Books are intimate.  An author speaking directly to you and exciting your imagination to make the words come to life.  That’s why readers are so critical of most film translations.  What they see in their mind’s eye is often very different than what ends up on the film.

But the point of a translation isn’t to reproduce what you saw when you read the book.  It’s not about reproduction… but production.

A good film translation is about taking a written story and presenting it visually so that it tells a story that is faithful to the original text but plays up the strengths of the medium its using.  You can say that Scott Pilgrim Vs The World is a dumb movie, if you want.  But what you can’t deny is that Scott Pilgrim‘s filmmakers took the original text (the comic book) and made a movie that uses every single strong element of motion pictures to tell the story as best as they could. Strong visuals, special effects, excellent music, great acting, sharp writing, skilled editing… all of it is used expertly to create a great film translation.

Deathly Hallows does the same.

I would even go further to say that Deathly Hallows transcends its material and does something that a film translation (if it’s handled well) can do: help us understand the original material better.  We can see what the author was trying to convey a little clearer perhaps because it is more than just words on a printed paper but sight and sound.  Our brain processes written words one way but music, spoken word, visual imagery, and other film elements in many different ways.  Films often strike different cords in different ways than books.

I’m not saying one is better than the other.

Film just ‘gets to us’ differently.

So what if you could create a story that used both mediums?

Food for thought….