The Carpetbagger: Rules of Adaptation

In the New York Times Award Blog, "The CarpetBagger," Melena Ryzik looks into the difficult field of adaptation with a post "How Hard Is It to Adapt a Hit Book? Ask the Makers of TINKER, TAILOR." It's a fun post with great quotes from TINKER, TAILOR, SOLDIER, SPY's star Gary Oldman, director Tomas Alfredson, and screenwriter Peter Straughn. To give a glimpse into the writer process, Staughn offers some choice anecdotes In one Straughn relates, "You know, normally you work with a director and they give you script notes, and Tomas would do things like, turn up a with a chess set and say, O.K., we're going to play chess today, and which character is which chess piece." And in antoher, Staughn explains how he was asked to think of the novel as a fairy tale: "about the king being killed and the rightful heir being thrown out of the kingdom and the bad prince taking over."