TORONTO – If some of the films at TIFF this year tell familiar stories it is because they are based on literary works.
There’s a film based on a book published five years ago and a film based on a play written more than 400 years ago. There are first-time adaptations and some that have been done time and time again.
TIFF audiences this year have already seen film versions of Jack Kerouac’s 1957 novel On the Road, starring Kristen Stewart and Garrett Hedlund; Leo Tolstoy’s 1877 classic Anna Karenina, starring Keira Knightley and Jude Law; Henry James’ 1897 novel What Maisie Knew, starring Julianne Moore and Steve Coogan; and William Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing, starring Amy Acker and Nathan Fillion.
Director Mira Nair’s TIFF contribution this year was The Reluctant Fundamentalist, a film based on the 2007 novel about a Pakistani man working in New York whose life is profoundly altered by the terrorist attacks of 9/11.
“Reading Mohsin Hamid’s brilliant and elegant mind game of a book about six months after I was in Lahore, I just knew that I had to do it,” she explained on Sunday. “Not only did it give me that portrait of a country we never see and hear about but we don’t really see an amazing and elegant dialogue with America… and that’s what the book gave me.”
Riaz jumped at the chance to play the lead character, Changez. “The combination of a book I love, a character I’d really fallen in love with, and Mira, meant I was desperate to be involved even before I’d seen the script. I was really intrigued to see how she would adapt it.”
Get breaking National news
Another book adapted for the first time, and presented at TIFF, is Midnight’s Children. Deepha Mehta’s interpretation of the 1980 Booker Prize-winning novel by Salman Rushdie about children born with mystical abilities just as India gains independence from Britain screens on Sunday night.
On Monday, TIFF hosts Dangerous Liaisons, originally a story of sex and betrayal among the French aristocracy that was first published in 1792. This Chinese version, set in Shanghai in the ‘30s and starring Zhang Ziyi, doesn’t follow the book as closely as other adaptations have – most memorably the 1998 film starring Glenn Close and John Malkovich that won three Oscars.
Also screening at TIFF on Monday is Foxfire: Confessions of a Girl Gang, the second big screen adaptation of the novel by Joyce Carol Oates – the first film in 1996 starred Angelina Jolie – since it was published in 1993. Set in America in the ‘50s, it was filmed in Sault Ste. Marie, Ont. by French director Laurent Cantet.
On Tuesday night, TIFF hosts a gala presentation of Great Expectations starring Ralph Fiennes and Helena Bonham Carter and directed by Mike Newell (Four Weddings and a Funeral). It is the latest of numerous versions of the classic novel by Charles Dickens, first published in 1861, that has been put on film.
Stars like Tom Hanks and Halle Berry were at TIFF for Saturday’s presentation of Cloud Atlas, the first adaptation of David Mitchell’s challenging 2004 novel.
Wachowski and co-directors Andy Wachowski and Tom Tykwer, managed to find a way to bring all the stories together. “When you read the book you see there are very resonant things in all six stories and so once we started seeing the resonant pieces of narrative we began to lay it out as if it was one big story. The book affects your brain. You read it and your brain no longer splits it up into six stories. Your brain begins making connections itself.”
Hugo Weaving, who worked with the Wachowskis on The Matrix trilogy, said on Sunday he was thrilled to be a part of the project.
“It’s fantastic source material,” he said, “and a great adaptation of that.”
Comments
Want to discuss? Please read our Commenting Policy first.