I’ve been waiting for this movie to get off the ground for years. I remember when it was first announced, in my IMDB forum lurking days, it was slated for a 2011 release, and I still remember thinking how long a wait that would be.  When the project was shelved, I knew it was in trouble.  It’s just such a difficult novel to adapt, not your average young adult formula of good triumphing over evil.

I wrote a short treatment of the novel for a literature film class. I envisioned a more conceptual approach. The actual plot was simple, it was the world that I thought should be as vivid as possible, with gradual changes in visuals as the film progressed (starting in black and white and gradually adding one color at a time), mimicking the character’s changes from within.  My initial approach was basically to make some Darren Aronofsky-esque boring art film that was more slow and emotional than plot driven. Not exactly a film targeted to the young adult audience. Not to insult YA audiences. Let’s just say that my overblown, self indulgent vision would probably need some toning down even for a general demographic. I just wanted to translate the experience I had from reading the book into film, but the two mediums elicit emotion in very different ways.

The book, one of my favorite books, manages to hold it’s audience because it is very character driven, we are in Jonas’s head and Jonas’s voice sounds very genuine to his age. But in a movie, you have a wider world to explore and less time to do it in. The scenes added to The Hunger Games movie, that weren’t in the book, illustrate the political climate and world a lot better than narrative exposition between the actors would have.  The book is from Katnis’s perspective, but in the movie you get to step outside of her and get a more concise understanding of the situation than if we relied on the character’s gradual realization alone. So after watching the trailer for The Giver, when I saw that they seemed to add more character interactions and more dialogue (much of the novel’s ideas are conveyed through Jonas’s inner thoughts) I was worried, but hopeful. They seem to have made a few minor characters more prominent and are making the governing body, in the form of Meryl Streep, more of an obvious antagonist (also, Hollywood can never resist slipping in a dramatic kiss).  I understand they have to make things more explicit in the movie or things will be left more confusing than artfully ambiguous. But too much spelling out and you might end up with another David Lynch style Dune, inner thoughts conveyed in voice overs (however much I love Dune, it probably wouldn’t work today).

The dangers with book adaptations is that you have to be explicit to convey an idea, but not so heavy handed that your just stating all the themes. So if the movie version has to inject some things into the plot to make a good movie, then I won’t resist (too much). Faithful adaptation don’t necessarily make good movies, that’s just the case for some books. A book could read like a movie and a movie could sound like a book (looking at you Chris Nolan), but the trick is finding the right approach to convey the ideas and spirit of the source material.

The Giver was more than a coming of age story to me. I saw it as a fight to claim your own identity and artistic freedom. I read it at a time when I didn’t really know what type of person I wanted to be, which I didn’t figure out until years later, but at that time, The Giver gave me the will to start that journey. It was also my introduction to dystopian stories and broadened my mind to a new way of thinking about the world around me, allowing me to examine the mechanics of society and a person’s place in it. However the filmmakers choose to interpret the novel for this adaptation, I hope it brings that sort of growth and introspection to many more people.