As I'm working on an adaptation OF THE ENTIRE NOVEL...
...at some point it occurred to me 'This guy did the equivalent of taking The Bible and turning it into a film that only featured Jesus.'
shareSo here's some excerpts from a Writers Guild of America interview from 2014 (my comments in bold):
Q: Making Winter’s Tale was a seven-year journey for you, and a very challenging one at that. Tell me about your first encounter with Mark Helprin’s novel, and why it was so resonant for you.
A: I read it in the ‘80s when it came out. Like a lot of people, I was entirely struck by the language, obviously, this love letter to New York City, but the thing that sort of rocked my world as a young man was the magical realism – American magical realism. I had read Borges, Cortazar, and 100 Years of Solitude, but I had never seen magical realism painted on an American canvas before. It was a brick and mortar world, but magic was seeping through. There was real drama and, in the midst of it, a flying white horse. That made sense to me, the marriage of the impossible and the ordinary and how they constantly shift places. It resonated for me, and for a zillion other people who have loved the book. Interestingly enough, I’ve found – and this is true, to some extent, with the movie as well – that the book can be very polarizing, based on giving it to friends of mine through the years. Some would be absolutely enchanted and others would absolutely disregard the book once the horse flew, as if real drama and magic cannot co-exist. I, of course, think they have to.
I'm not so sure the problem is real drama vs magical realism, those who can suspend disbelief vs those who can't. There's a difference between 'magical realism' and 'satire'. There are portions of the novel that so much want to be in a Terry Gilliam flick. But -for me- they don't work on the page, and they certainly wouldn't work on the screen when you've got these other grounded elements...such as the Peter Lake/Beverly Penn romance.
Q: Helprin’s novel was, for a long time, considered to be unfilmable. What made you think you could do it?
A: I didn’t really film the novel, at least not in its entirety. Part of my way out of that, honestly, was to skip Hardesty Marratta [a key figure in the book], who has hundreds of pages dedicated to him in the novel, and he only made one scene in one draft of my screenplay. I just followed the love story between Peter and Beverly. That love story most ignited my imagination when I read the novel, so that became the spine of the storytelling for me.
Yeah. He's right (and I've said this elsewhere in a thread): he didn't film the novel. He filmed a particular portion of the novel. The love story between Peter and Beverly. Which does not form the backbone of the story. He mentions skipping Hardesty's sections, but he did the same to every other character beyond Peter and Beverly; the amount he left out probably totals about 600 pages. "I just followed the love story between Peter and Beverly." Yup. Which is why it never should have been called 'Winter's Tale'. (In the same way that 'Simon Birch' wasn't filmed as 'A Prayer for Owen Meany'.)