From Dune to The Lord Of The Rings and Orlando, cinema history is littered with books long considered 'unfilmable'. We take a look at a few...
This article first appeared in Film Stories issue 42 in May 2023.
Anyone who has read Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life will likely have emerged from it bruised. Across 720 pages, Yanagihara succeeded in her aim of making it feel like a stultifying place that the reader “couldn’t get out of.” As unappetising as all this may seem, the book’s success illustrates that its themes (which include depression, addiction, sexuality, self-harm and suicide) resonated with many. This connection has led to continual interest in transforming it beyond the page.
That’s clearly quite some creative challenge, but Dutch stage director Ivo van Hove has taken it up. James Norton leads the cast in the current London stage version following van Hove’s previous Dutch language version – with a four-hour running time – that played in Amsterdam in 2018 (and briefly at the Edinburgh Film Festival last year). Rave reviews suggest that the obstacles of adapting the many interweaving plotlines for the stage appear to have been met, but it seems that bringing it to screen has raised rather more.
Yanaghira herself told the BBC she doubts that A Little Life could “exist” as a film. Whilst she considers that there are solutions for difficulties created by the text – such as using animation or CGI to depict scenes imagined in the book – she told The Guardian that screen adaptation scripts have been rejected by a range of studios, streamers and networks (Hulu commissioned four scripts but then declined to progress). Maybe it is destined to be one of those books considered ‘unfilmable.’