Robin Swicord on adapting novels to a screenplay

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/.