Sundance Collab recently gave a fascinating master class taught by the great Robin Swicord on adaptations.
It's free to watch her class (click on the video at the bottom of the page linked to above). You do have to sign up at sundance collab but you can do that without a credit card or anything like that. I'm just going to give you a selection of her three hour lecture so you can decide if you want to see the whole thing:
... Start making notes on what unique qualities describe the protagonist. And beyond that, look for the ways the protagonist hinders themself. When do they get in their own way? You also want to start to identify the antagonist -- that person or system that opposes the protagonist. If it's a system, what person or people would you consider inventing in order to represent that system in the story?
One example that I can give you is the movie "Hidden Figures" that gave us in an insidious system that opposes the the protagonist. Standing in for that system is a composite character made up by the screenwriters Al Harrison played by Kevin Costner. History gave us Katherine Johnson a mathematician who worked for NASA, Margot Lee Shetterly gave us the facts in her well-researched nonfiction book,
and the writers Allison Schroeder and Theodore Melfi crafted the screenplay. At each stage that story got shaped and told from the individuals point of view. When we work from history, there is no single objective truth. That is something to keep in mind if you are anxious about having to supply something that the story doesn't give us an order to make it more dramatic. There was no Al Harrison, but we needed him for the movie.
Keep in mind that the protagonist shrinks to the size of their antagonist or their problem, so if you give a protagonist too small of a problem, it makes the protagonist seem smaller.
When you give them an antagonist or problem of sufficient size, they become enabled and you see that in "Hidden Figures" where you have this very small ignoble little human problem of being denied access to a convenient bathroom in terms of a dramatic problem you think that's not that huge. But it was huge because that problem stood in for the much larger ennobling problem of systemic racism sexism that affected the women who worked at NASA. ...
I can't embed her video but you can access the video from the sundance collab site https://collab.sundance.org/.
Brad Rushing is a cinematographer who was recently interviewed on the youtube channel Film Courage. It was so insipring to me, I thought I'd post a few outakes of his interview. For more details, see the full interview.
Q: How do you keep faith in yourself and in your craft during turbulent times?
A: ... there was a time early in my career (early on in the 90’s) where I was so frustrated and so down and didn’t believe in myself and I just had this revelation You know what, I’ve set a goal. I don’t have to believe in myself. I just have to do the steps that I committed to doing to get me through the valley of the shadow of death, and that worked for me. It was a device that worked for me and I feel like occasionally I still have it. ... I just find that my brain is a little more complex in terms of the things it does to me. I don’t know that I am always in the driver’s seat and, quite honestly, I deal with self-esteem issues. I really do. I think a lot of people do in this business. Your identity is tied up in your work, even if you don’t want it to be because you put so much of yourself into it ... I do try and keep faith in myself and you know honestly when I do have crisis with the system or success is a nebulous thing I really get basic and I go back and remind myself: Brad you're an artist. That was the contract you made. You never said you wanted to be rich. I don’t care about being rich. I would like to be self-sufficient. I’d like to be secure. If I was rich it would be okay but I’d be donating, helping, and so on. I mean, I just don’t need a super yacht and an island. But I remind myself of the contract that I made was that I wanted to be an artist, simple as that.
For more questions and his wise advise, see the interview on Film Courage.
