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Aim for adaptation and it fails
Writing without aiming
A book is a book. Harlan Coben writes without thinking about adaptation, even though most of his books do adapt. If he aims for it, it doesn't work. When a book goes to the screen, he is willing to change everything.
Why faithfulness fails
He doesn't believe in staying slavishly devoted to the text. The worst adaptations are the ones that try to reproduce the book, and he sees no point in them: anyone who wants the experience of the book can read the book. What matters is what makes a good TV series or a good movie.
Action on page and screen
His novels handle action scenes from inside the character. A punch is written as what the person is thinking as the fist flies at them, not as the movement of a hand. Film has to do the opposite and show it from outside, which interests him much less, and he is not very engaged while those scenes are shot.
Why do film adaptations change books so much?
Stanley Kubrick's 1980 film The Shining departs sharply from Stephen King's novel, and King has criticized it for years. He later supervised a 1997 television miniseries that follows the book more closely. Both versions have found audiences, and the film is widely regarded as a classic.
Why is inner thought hard to film?
Film records behavior and sound, so a character's private thoughts must be carried by performance, voice-over, or editing. In the 1910s and 1920s, Soviet filmmaker Lev Kuleshov showed audiences the same actor's face paired with different images. Viewers read different emotions into the identical expression.
How did Coben's American stories cross borders?
Netflix transplanted his novels to settings around the world. The Stranger, released in 2020, was set in England, and The Woods, also from 2020, was set in Poland. The original novels were set in New Jersey suburbs.
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