And even if I did, it probably wouldn't be any good." "Why not?" Truffaut asked. To which the director answered: "Well, I shall never do that, precisely because Crime and Punishment is somebody else's achievement. The question Truffaut specifically put to him was whether he would ever consider making a screen adaptation of a great novel such as Crime and Punishment. Looking a little more closely at what Hitchcock said gives us a clear explanation of why this is so often the case. And none of these examples is a travesty, exactly, although we could all name some of those if we wanted to: film history – especially recent film history – is littered with examples where a good novel has been transformed, not into an average movie, but an outright disaster: Captain Corelli's Mandolin and The Bonfire of the Vanities spring immediately to mind. Pride and Prejudice could possibly be on the first, but neither Robert Z Leonard's nor Joe Wright's adaptations will make the second. Joyce's Ulysses might well be on the first list, but Joseph Strick's Ulysses (1967) certainly won't be on the second. Draw up one of those faintly ludicrous but fascinating lists of the 20 greatest novels, and then do the same for movies: do they match up, at all? Of course not. I accepted the offer at once, and then almost immediately wondered what I'd let myself in for: because the truth is that 99 times out of 100, I'm with Hitchcock on this one.
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