Translating a Novel into Film

     When my husband, David Payne, was commissioned to write the screenplay for his second novel, Early From the Dance, he somewhat reluctantly accepted and asked me to collaborate. Working together quickly reminded me of what I think David hadn’t fully realized yet: adapting a novel to film is like translating into a foreign language. Prose and film images have very different conventions, strengths and limitations.
     Early From the Dance tells the story of A. Jenrette, a hip, well-known but emotionally teetering artist who returns from Manhattan to the small southern hometown he fled 13 years before after a devastating experience involving himself, his best friend Cary Kinlaw, and Jane McCrae, the woman they both loved. Cary subsequently committed suicide, an act for which A., rightly or wrongly, still feels wrenching and unresolved guilt, a major source of his present-day emotional struggles.
     In his book, David originally told the story in A. and Jane’s alternating first-person voices, taking us deep into the interior consciousness of both characters, revealing hope, fear, memory, and the dawning of an irresistible illicit love in strong, vivid prose. The story of what happened to the threesome is revealed early in the novel, and the beauty of the language carries us through seeing it enacted. As we couldn’t make use of prose or interior consciousness in a screenplay, the story had to be told differently. Therefore, in the screenplay, we do not quickly reveal anything, but rather through a series of flashbacks, unexplained images and a repeated dream sequence hint at the past while A. is being confronted by memories of Cary in his hometown. As the past is slowly being revealed to us, the film audience simultaneously follows the present-day story in which A. and Jane reencounter each other and get a second chance at first love. The two storylines culminate in an extended flashback of that fateful summer when A. is drawn back to the beach, the scene of the crime, so to speak, with Jane, concerned about A.’s mental stability, in pursuit.
     The second departure from the novel is in the flashback itself. In the book, that summer includes a long and fascinating tale of Cleanth Faison, a charismatic yet questionable character who becomes a kind of guru to the young A. as he struggles with his love for Jane and loyalty to Cary. However, where the novelist has 600 pages in which to wend his tale, the screenwriter has 120. Although Cleanth was too instrinsic to the story for us to simply cut him, we had to express the essence of Cleanth in very few scenes. We chose to omit almost all references to Cleanth’s past and present activities. Instead we created several short scenes – a dinner party, sharing drugs, and playing "life poker" – in which Cleanth wins A.’s admiration and trust. These are followed by a climactic hunting scene in which that trust is shattered when Cleanth is revealed to be other than what he claims to be, a revelation which propels A. into Jane’s arms. Thus, we kept the screenplay focused on the heart of the story: A.’s emotional redemption and the love between him and Jane.
     In the end, though the script form presents a writer with a more limited verbal palette than the novel, it forces him—and her—to boil down thoughts and images to their clearest, most concise essence, a challenge I think David eventually came to appreciate as much as I did. Every picture is worth a thousand words in film.

Profile of David Payne Purchase Early From the Dance