While vis­it­ing my par­ents, I had the oppor­tu­nity to watch Life of Pi, which is the first time in at least ten years that I’ve seen a movie nom­i­nated for an Oscar, but that’s beside the point. One of the rea­sons I chose that movie was because the book is my book club’s selec­tion for February.

After I got home, I read the book, and of course, com­pared it to the movie ver­sion of the story. As expected, they weren’t a per­fect match, but I will say they were close. There were some scenes in the movie that weren’t in the book, but over­all, it was a very good adap­ta­tion. (My mother was impressed with the ani­mals and I hated to have to tell her they weren’t “real”. She was also unaware there was a book that pre­dated the movie.)

Books aren’t movies, and movies aren’t books. One takes place in your head; the other in front of your eyes. The point of view is going to be dif­fer­ent, and you’re not going to be privy to the inner thoughts of your char­ac­ters. You’ll see what they do, hear what they say, but you won’t know what they’re thinking.

Note: these are generalizations—if a movie is nar­rated by a POV char­ac­ter, for exam­ple, the above won’t hold. 

 I tend to be dis­ap­pointed in a movie if I see it after read­ing the book. One excep­tion for me was The Hunt for Red Octo­ber. I think that was a movie that pulled the impor­tant story threads from the book and was tighter than the book itself with­out los­ing any­thing. (Of course if you’re some­one who under­stood all the jar­gon and acronyms in the book, and could deal with the way the story bounced around, you might have a dif­fer­ent opinion.)

Another prob­lem of movies is cast­ing. If we’ve read a book, we’ll have our own image of the char­ac­ters. If you see the movie first, the actors will prob­a­bly super­im­pose them­selves on any visu­als you could con­jure up. The brouhaha about cast­ing Tom Cruise as Jack Reacher is a case in point. Reacher is a BIG man. Tom Cruise isn’t. If you’ve never read one of Lee Child’s books, then it prob­a­bly won’t bother you. But if you see the movie, then read the books, you might have a major dis­con­nect with the char­ac­ter. Does that make it a ‘bad’ movie? Based purely on cast­ing, I would say no, but I haven’t seen the movie, so I can’t judge. We’ll wait for the Net­flix release.

Michael Con­nelly has writ­ten about 20 books where his char­ac­ter, Harry Bosch, is on the page. Yet Con­nelly said he doesn’t think he’s writ­ten 80 words of descrip­tion of Bosch in all the books. He’d prob­a­bly be “easy” to cast if the pro­duc­ers wanted to stay true to the character—then again, there are prob­a­bly as many images of Bosch as there are readers.

Movies from books are adap­ta­tions. Some­one other than the author is tak­ing a story, decid­ing how it will trans­late to the screen, and to the time con­straints of a movie (or a tele­vi­sion show). (For the record, I thought both the book and the movie Life of Pi were too long.) They may decide there needs to be some love inter­est, or other con­flict that will appeal to movie –goers. Often, the book and the movie are alike in name only.

Can you judge a movie by a book, or vice versa? I recall a book club selec­tion that was also a movie release. There were a few mem­bers of the club who said they didn’t read the book, but gave it a score because they saw (and enjoyed) the movie. Those who read the book but didn’t see the movie tended to give it much lower scores. (And, for the record, if I were in charge, I wouldn’t have allowed those who hadn’t read the book to score it based on the movie, but I’m not, and frankly, most of what I enjoy about book club is see­ing what read­ers think of books and why. As a writer, I can’t read the same way they do.)

What’s your pref­er­ence? Do you pre­fer a book to a movie? Do you want to read first or watch first?