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Adapting a Novel to the Big Screen: A Conversation with Carl Franklin
From: American Film Institute
| By:
Carl Franklin |
EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION |
Beginning his career as an actor in film and television in the 1970s, Carl Franklin (below) first demonstrated his talent behind-the-scenes in 1986 with his American Film Institute thesis film, Punk. Soon, Franklin  was working for producer Roger Corman, directing One False Move, which won a New Generation Award from the Los Angeles Film Association and a Best New Filmmaker award at MTV's 1993 Movie Awards. Franklin's next feature was Devil in a Blue Dress, based on the Walter Mosley novel of the same name. A study of the African American experience in World War II Los Angeles, the film exquisitely captures the sultry jazz milieu of Central Avenue.
In this account of the making of Devil in a Blue Dress, Franklin shares his strategies for retaining the essence of a novel when adapting a story to film. |
 think the prototype of adaptation is what John Ford did with Grapes of Wrath, which was a book of over 400 pages boiled down to two hours. Somehow he gets the essence of that book on film. I thought about that project as I worked with the Devil in a Blue Dress novel. The literary material I was dealing with was jazzy, kind of unpredictable. The book had an unsyncopated pace and a lazy Southern quality. |
Most of the blacks who moved out to Los Angeles during this time came from Louisiana, Texas and other southern states. And they transplanted those southern communities here in Los Angeles. I wanted to keep that feeling. I didn't want to go too far where the pace got flabby, but at the same time it couldn't be staccato because it wouldn't be true. |
In literature, the author has the opportunity to explore in pages all kinds of explanations inside of characters' heads. You can be more psychologically motivated than you can in film where you have a finite medium where you have to give an image and a certain set of audio and visual information presented clearly. |
When a film is an original idea, at least for me, it writes itself. It won't let you sleep. It wakes you up. You're writing on napkins. You're almost having wrecks on the street trying to talk into the tape recorder. When you adapt a screenplay, my experience is that somehow you are so mindful of the spirit of another work that you are always trying to keep from being a generation removed. That's why I didn't want to do Devil in a Blue Dress as a straight film noir, because I didn't want it to be derivative of movies from 1948. You run the danger of being one generation removed from what the author was able to do with the book initially. |
I didn't approach the project thinking that I was confined to the film noir genre. I really felt it was going to veer more toward social realism but that the noir component would be inescapable. The main difference is that the main character is not a film noir kind of character. Usually, if you look at someone like Sam Spade or Phillip Marlow, these characters are very cynical and usually the world they operate in is a world of cynicism that they are very comfortable in. And anyone who doesn't understand that cynicism is a sucker. Here, our protagonist is the sucker. Our protagonist is the guy who's learning about this cynical world and somehow leads a double life. So, in a way, we've almost taken the film noir category and turned it inside out. |
On themes found in <I>Devil in a Blue Dress</I>
I start by looking for universal truths of some kind and certain kinds of thematic principles that reach me on an emotional, visceral level. Then, I start to see the film. I start to see scenes. I start to smell it. I start to feel as though I am inside that world. |
Here at AFI, Tony Vellani [producer] instilled in us this idea of a three-word premise that I've used as a key in all the films I've made, and in this one [Devil in a Blue Dress] it's "Courage leads to freedom." |
Then, of course, the theme also dealt with the American Dream. It's about a guy who makes a pact with a Faustian kind of character and then gets exposed to the reality behind the facade where the cogs and pulleys exists--where the back-room deals are made. And he is somehow able to navigate through those subterranean waters, and he comes out the other end with his principles fairly well intact. |
But what propels him is his own fear. He's overcoming the fear as it represents itself externally through the police and other antagonists. And then there's the internal fear of becoming corrupt. So there's fear within and fear without. It really is about a man--specifically a black man in 1948--overcoming fear, which was a huge obstacle at that time, and still is. |
I selected the painting that opens Devil in post-production. We found a painting that married what we had done in the movie with what we were trying to convey. We controlled the colors in the frame to imbue them with earth tones that would correspond to the humble, worn sense of the era. It was 1948, three years after the end of World War II, and for four years the US was pretty much caught up in a war effort, so there wasn't much new in society--new cars, new clothes, etc. They were coming out of rationing. |
We also wanted to show this violation of the American Dream--the hypocrisy involved in his having lost his job. We see him come home and we see all of these people in their new houses on the street, and he is overly willing to be part of that whole world. |
This was a time of tremendous optimism in the US. We had just become a world power, and there was something to be had for everybody who worked hard to get it. So we see the central character in his house. We see him in his yard. We see him in the process of constructing, trying to build up that little piece of the American Dream--planting that tree, which becomes symbolically important. |
On working with actors
We'll improvise when we rehearse, but when we shoot I don't like to improvise. I like to have the feel of looseness in a scene without going so far as improvising. You may change the words so they fit the actor's mouth when delivered, but I don't want to get into a situation where it just goes on and on. I think that gets flabby. |
I will give what I think is a motivation, but I think that the actor has to somehow internalize that because in film we're always shooting the subtext. Everyone has personal motives. There are all those little personal things that only the actor can know that will bring another layer to the performance. For example, a character may ostensibly be trying to get information from another character, but underneath, maybe at the same time he's interested in showing off his new hairstyle or something. |
Director Sidney Lumet has a great rehearsal process. He's got this warehouse, and he tapes out all the scenes. If there's a scene in a car, they have these little cars they ride in and people push them around. They get a camera and run it with no film. |
For a lot of actors, that camera spooks them. I thought that was genius, the idea of having the camera with no film in it running to get the actors used to it. |
On the biggest temptation in filmmaking
There will be a temptation to do something that you think is acceptable, where you'll look at a certain style and think it's slick. Maybe somebody spent a lot of money on a project and you think you have to spend the same amount of money on your project. |
Keep your own voice. Don't let yourself be pulled off your mark. You're going to experience that temptation to do what you think you ought to do as opposed to what you want to do. You've got something to say. Everybody has something unique to say based on unique experiences. Tap into it. |
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