Being intent to post the news on "No Spoilers" board, I completely missed the existing thread here

As to the portraiture of footage in the movie, I somehow see it as taking some of the best still b/w photoraphy somewhere and animating it either via the skills of Japanese anime people, or with the deft touch of someone like Kar-Wai (ChungKing express was already mentioned here, but I think that Fallen Angels are even more characteristic, and In The Mood For Love is a masterpiece).

Yes! I like the still photography idea. It seems like it has to be an import of some existing great art rather than an attempt to make great art within the parameters of the movie, which is already it's own attempt to be great art. Hopefully.

::shakes head::

Ever seen a car wreck? Doubtless you have.

Now... have you ever seen a car wreck BEFORE it happened? Like, you can see Car A headed straight for Car B and even though they haven't even come close to colliding yet, you can already sorta hear the crash of metal, the squeal of tires, the breaking of glass, the honking of horn- the sudden stillness.... all, before the two cars even meet.

From a technically artistic POV, I would say that the footage was like an artistic car wreck that everyone could see was GOING to happen, but somehow it wasn't happening yet. It was artistically beautiful and people were seeing it, but no one knew who made it or where it was coming from- it was nameless, faceless, anonymous: an artistic train wreck, just begging for attention (as good art is wont to do) without really begging for anything. Sorta commanding attention, really. An anomaly.

So people looked. And they kept looking, watching intently, wondering when the crash was gonna come, when the boom would be lowered and some tag line would appear, "This art brought to you by: X." But it never came. So they KEPT waiting.

What if Car A and Car B, through some absurdly kind act of God (tm), never collided. You have this vision of a car wreck that never happened playing again and again in your head. Who do you call? What do you report.... a wreck that didn't happen? Or do you continue to stare at that empty spot, where you know there SHOULD be quite a mess, but isn't, wondering if you missed something very important?

The footage itself, from what I gather, was fairly lack-luster. But the thing that it WASN'T is what got everyone's attention. It WAS the final product of a deeply wounded woman who could not communicate with the outside world with conventional means- it was her way of talking about her pain, sharing it, so that it wouldn't kill her inside anymore. Her gigantic "ouchie." A wreck. But it most definitely wasn't sensational. It was captivating in that it was painful to see and not know who it belonged to.

New here. Nice place

I have to say, though it came from left field, I'd back the choice of Peter Weir as director 100%. Aside from the Aussie pride factor, if you look at any of his films, they ALL deal with protagonists suffering from dislocation and alienation, on a personal journey into the surreal. It's a theme central to his work and he understands it very well. Even MASTER AND COMMANDER had some beautifully eerie moments of strangeness during the Galapagos sequence.

He's a supremely intelligent man, and as is obvious he's not going to make silly concessions to the business end in order to please the studios. You can read a myriad of interviews with him on this point. All his films, even the big "Hollywood" ones, have a tremendous integrity and succeed on their own terms. He's also modest and 'invisible' enough as a director to let the story take center stage instead of his own stylistic flourishes.

Wong Kar-Wai is almost too obvious a choice. He would be good, certainly, in the sense that his work exhibits the same themes, but his movies seem to be so much the result of his own unique working process that I can't imagine him sitting down to adapt somebody else's book or script without changing it utterly ten times over. He'd be more the footage-maker than the movie-of-the-book-maker, I think. Add to that the fact that he is notoriously and excruciatingly slow, and it'd just mean the movie would never get made until it had lost its relevance. Though it would be a great first English-language movie for him to tackle.

I agree with the previous poster who said that the correct way to treat the 9/11 references is in a similar way to the way it was done in 25TH HOUR - wow, that was an extraordinarily powerful but subtle evocation of the effects of that day.

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He's also modest and 'invisible' enough as a director to let the story take center stage instead of his own stylistic flourishes.

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IMO this is the exact reason why Peter Weir is the wrong director to film an adaptation of PR.

I personally think the film needs someone with a keen stylistic vision in order to inject life into the material, which occasionally, can be pedestrian. Although having said that those particular sections of the book which focus on Cayce's web presence may be considered superfluous, and subsequently they may be simplified in the film.

We could debate back and forth until the film is released regarding which director we think is best suited to film PR. But in the end I think in boils down to personal taste.

I found this link in the Guardians film section which mentions Peter Weir in negotiations to direct Pattern Recognition.

Peter Weir, who earned a best director Oscar nomination this year for his seafaring adventure Master and Commander, is in talks to direct the thriller Pattern Recognition. Variety says the story is based on a novel by William Gibson, the author of Neuromancer and godfather of cyberpunk, and centres on a marketing expert who becomes ensnared in an internet investigation.

it's true, there is potential for infinite disagreement on every point about the hypothetical movie. Weren't the biggest LOTR haters all fans of Tolkien from, like, age five?

It's funny, actually, movies of books are one of the rare times when lots of people have really specific ideas about how a work of art should turn out. People aren't sitting around arguing bitterly about what Gibson's next novel should be about...

Wow,

for once I am struck dumb. The exchange between Radiocat and Nightshadow is fascination and I trully just want to sit back and lurk. Nightshadow, you are the first poster on any forum who has actually deepened my appreciation of a work of art. Not to say that I agree with all of your positions. Radiocat spirited defense is captivating too (I am in fact more inclined to your position. I would really like to find some position where both of you could be equally right.

jaydee

I think the movie adaptation should reflect the story as it was presented, nothing more and nothing less.

This is, invariably, where I always get my panties into a twist (barring the fact that I'm a straight male, don't wear panties and think the line of thought should stop there): the artistic vision of a story, in the case where a book is being adapted to film, has already taken place. The book's author has done all the creative leg work. If a director then makes a movie using the book as a guide but inserts the director's own artistic impressions of the story itself... well, we get a completely different work of art and, in some ways, a completely different story. It's like... dancing about architecture.

Either be faithful to a very easily translatable story (which is something any decent director is capable of doing) OR make a completely different story that is somewhat loosely based on a pre-existing story you really dig- but don't be so heartless as to name this different story-turned-movie "Pattern Recognition" (sic)... that ruins it for some OTHER director who might want to, someday, do a faithful adaptation.

I firmly and staunchly believe that a book's author should have a very significant say in how his/her story is adapted to film. If the book was successful in trade, that means the audience liked that story as-is already. Why fix something that ain't broke?

NightShadow, I agree with you. But so often I have waited in anticipation for a movie only to find that it scarecly resembles the book.

I mean, I just about like Naked Lunch now, but I wish Cronenberg had called it something else.

It appears that there is a particular problem with adapting Mr. Gibson's works, and I do not think that it can be solved by being unfathfull to the literal text. But even a very faithful translation can go awry.

I too would like to belive that it is feasable to create luminous, transformative cinematic adaptaion of Pattern Recognition.

It deserves one.

But, realistically, with the precidents we have, I can only home that they don't fuck it up.

jaydee

The biggest point in PR's favor, as far as translating it to film is concerned, is that it's setting is in the present-day. All the technology in it exists and is quite familiar to us. No holograms. No fancy gadgets which defy understanding/explanation. No AI. No unrealistic or barely-described interfaces. No absurdly outrageous characters. No anachronisms. No VR-dependent cyberspace.

It's just everyday stuff that any and most of us see and play with all the time. Mac Cubes. Cell phones. JPG's. Web browsers. Airplanes. Cars. Key-entry door locks. Contemporary clothing. Cameras. Google. Asian Sluts getting what they deserve. It's all here, baby. And it can all be easily put on celluloid (though, to be fair, celluloid isn't being used anymore).

Such was not the case with Johnny, Neuromancer, VL, the Count or any of the other books- or even the short stories- they were all futuristic and, in some ways, socialogically surreal. Artistic impression would have to go through a triple-filter (1st, author; 2nd, set designer; 3rd, director).

PR is NOT scifi. It wasn't really meant to be, as far as I can tell. And I think that might be where the big "hang-up" is coming from. Gibson is considered to be a scifi author. When he produces a storyline set in THIS day and age, the audience has a tendency to scratch their heads and go, "But... shouldn't there be some cool, nifty ninja-shit here? Where's the cyberpunk stuff?" PR is about as cyberpunk as your grandmother's bunny slippers. But that doesn't make the story uninteresting, not by a long shot.

And this, I feel, is where a director must REALLY pay attention. This is a perfect opportunity to translate a perfectly good story into a perfectly good film. I sincerely hope that Weir or whoever ends up directing the movie, if there ever IS one, actually resists the temptation to pigeon-hole Mr. Gibson's work.

Of course it would be crazy of any director to put lots of cyberpunk special effects into PR, but, NightShadow, what you're saying *should* be done is much harder than you're making it sound. It's like the stick under water, you have to bend it to make it look straight.

You keep talking about "translating" the book into film and saying that PR is particularly easy to translate. But, take actual translation. If you translate a paragraph of Spanish into English, you have to make all kinds of choices and do all kinds of work to make it sound the "same" as the original. In fact, it will never sound the same for the simple reason that it's in a different language. And beyond that, as soon as you start translating you have to make a major decision - do you translate literally, in which case the exact meaning gets across but the language sounds warped and unnatural, or do you try to recreate the spirit of the text in English, in which case you necessarily have to sacrifice much of the literal meaning, putting new turns of phrases, new jokes etc. in their place?

Most of us prefer to read translations that recreate the spirit of the original - you can read a literal translation of a poem without getting any sense of its music in the original language, and what's the point of that? - but making those translations is very difficult and very *creative* work. You have to know how to make music in your own language in order to do it for someone else's writing.

Making a movie from a book has to be a similar process. As Gibson said in the UCLA talk that Caroline so wonderfully reported on in another thread, books and movies are utterly different media; they express different things in different ways. So, making a movie "like" a book is very difficult and requires a talented and creative director. There's no such thing as a simple transparent shift from one to the other, the whole thing has to be rebuilt.

I agree with you that it's terrible when Hollywood takes books away from their authors and changes them in what it considers a crowd-pleasing way, but I also think that writing books and writing movies are two such completely different processes, that the novelist doesn't necessarily know how to write the movie. And why should s/he? It takes someone specially talented to write a screenplay in a way that maintains the strength of the book. The real problem is that there aren't all that many talented people around, or they're not necessarily the ones Hollywood hires...

To get back to the original issue of the footage for a sec, I still say that Gibson endows it with a special power in his writing, and that a movie would have to endow it with that power visually - a very difficult thing to do.

"it is something about the footage. The feel of it. The mystery. You can't explain it to someone who isn't there. They'll just look at you. But it matters, matters in some unique way."

I don't necessarily think it would be difficult to do as much as it would be time-consuming to do. Nora, before the bombing "accident", had filmed a lot of that footage as a college student, for film class. Then it sorta just got canned and never went anywhere. After her surgery, though, she went back over that old footage from her college days and slightly altered it, frame by frame, and chopped it up into asynchronus clips- totally out of sequence. The action in each sequence was perfectly described by the author (thank you Mr. Gibson!), but he never really told us the subtle ways in which each frame was modified. I suspect color hues, stray pixels/lines, lighting, text (perhaps blurred out with Photoshop/Premiere, so that the text wouldn't detract from the camera's focal points?) and other errata were touched up during this process- but not in an overtly or blatant method.

If the film director hires the right CG team to do that, it is possible to make it work and have the desired effect. I suppose Nora was going for the same "feeling" one gets while watching a French black-and-white noir film, except hers were still in color. Wim Wenders' "Wings of an Angel" had that feeling, both during its b&w and color sequences- even though he didn't have any CG work done on the film in the way that Nora had. So it CAN be done and done well.

It's one of those stories which, if Hollywood makes it, will have to look VERY un-Hollywood.

Returning to Peter Weir as director, I have some optimism over this. I deeply dreaded the filming of Master and Commander, being a long-time fan of Patrick O'Brian's books. I just KNEW they could not be sensibly translated to the screen. And when I saw who was playing Maturin, I feared the worst.
I Finally saw Master and Commander on video last week. Damn fine movie, and quite faithful to the message of the books. I thought Crowe made a good Aubrey, and, while Bettany did not in the least resemble in appearance the Maturin we know and love, he was at any rate the spirit of Maturin in intellect and interests. It was, in short, a well-presented illustration of O'Brian's novels, which I greatly enjoyed and will watch again, but was in no way a substitute for them. You still have to read the books even if you've seen the movie.
On this basis, Master and Commander being a much bigger challenge to screen than PR, I'd tend to trust Peter Weir with the story. It may turn out not to be the ACTUAL BOOK, but I'd trust it'll retain what the book was saying.

^^ Which was what, exactly? I mean, what IS the crux of Pattern Recognition? That consumerism is evil, but it's here to stay? That art is not defined by labels, names or logos, even when it is? That Gibson doesn't necessarily have to write scifi/cyberpunk in order to write a good story?

Help me out here.

Each reader gets its own juice, usually different ones on different readings. That is specially true with Gibson, who relies a lot on the reader providing part of the eliptic story.

For me, it is a story of coping with life/horror, and staying "normal". There is a subplot of what makes people normal, as several partially or wholly dehumanized and abnormal characters appear. The almost senseless Cayce from the beginning becomes an almost normal human being at the end.

Of course that arises from the second reading. The first reading was mostly "the quest is the thing", as you can find yourself while looking for something else, mixed with "What makes things valuable?" or why do we desire a determinate object?

José

Radiocat

I have to agree with you whole heartedly, Translation is a creative act, it cannot be successfully undertaken with a literalist approach.

gil, Your posting gives me most hope, If Mr. Weir understands the way of getting across the spirit rather than the letter of a novel then we are halfway there.

NightShadow, I'm with JRE on this, every novel means something different to each reader, what you bring to it is as important as what you take away.

jaydee

This was already posted on the spoilers board, but for completeness' sake:

'Pattern Recognition' IMDb entry

Reading through the previous posts I'm unsure why anybody should object to Peter Weir. Pretty much the whole body of his work up to now has the alienation of the individual through the action of technology or society (or both) at it's core.
A few examples at random:
The Cars that Ate Paris. well, nobody got a good deal from the hardware in that movie.
The Mosquito Coast Harrison Ford & co escape from the rest of us. Still have unpleasant experiences with machines. Incidentally, I'd recomend that any regular of the board read O-Zone by Paul Theroux. A cyber-punker that got in under everybody's radar. And he's Louis's dad too!
WitnessHarrison again. Hiding amongst the lowest tech community in the US, the Amish. Society comes and gets him.
The Truman Show Truman's a literal prisoner of technology in this one.
Haven't seen Master and Commander yet.

Weir is the perfect director for PR. I'd be rather more concerned about David Arata, who's IMDB entry looks a little uninspiring.

But I know nothing. If you're reading this David, as surely you must be, here's your opportunity to put our minds at rest. Is it going to be faithful to the book (in spirit if not necessarily in plot) or just another Hollywood movie?

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the alienation of the individual through the action of technology or society

The Last Wave has that kind of mojo going too.

Seven
Days
in
May

http://www.destgulch.com/movies/7days/