Harry Potter: The Role Model For Film Adaptation

Harry Potter and the Adaptation from Novel to Film

1. "An adaptation is undeniably an appropriation of the text, and although the plot remains the same, the telling ’ or the interpreting of it ’ radically changes from one generation to the next."

2. "You've only got about thirty pages to set everything up. Establish your main characters ... ground the audience in the world where your story takes place, introduce the dramatic problem, and move into the second act."

The author discusses the difference between a "good film" and a "good film version of a book". She focuses on the Harry Potter Series and dissects the films one by one. The process of adapting a book for film is tedious and the Harry Potter Series seems to have done this well. A big part of the films success is dedicated to the fact that J.K. Rowling was a collaborator in the scriptwriting process This benefitted the film because J.K. Rowling knows the story best. J.K. Rowling set criteria for many things in the movie that she felt would show off her book best. She chose much of the set design and her main request was that the characters casted must actually be British.

In this article, I noticed that the marketing techniques in the United States and the United Kingdom are very different. This is because they are trying to sell the movie to a different target audience. Different versions of films are also aired to different countries in order to aide to a specific group of people. Those living in the United States may know the first Harry Potter movie as "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone" but in the United Kingdom they called it "Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone". 


In accordance to the casting of adaptation films, it is very difficult to find an actor that fits a readers prototype of a specific character. As always, the director must take into account the popularity of a specific actor. If an actor is too popular the viewer may not look at them as if they are the character of a book. One thing that the director cannot control when casting a film is how the viewers are going to react emotionally to a specific character. For example, in the Harry Potter Series, teenage girls fell in love with Harry's enemy, Draco Malfoy, because he was an attractive young boy. This caused author J.K. Rowling to be perplexed because the viewers should be falling more in with the hero, Harry, rather than the enemy.

Films have been adapted from novels, T.V. series, and even musicals. Directors must meticulously craft every element from set design to cast in order to capture a readers vision of an imaginary world, but they also must understand that everyone read the book in a different way and it is almost impossible to please everyone.