The Studio

The Studio

The Art of Adaptation

People hear “adaptation” and think of something secondary — a copy, a translation, a lesser version of the real thing. It is the opposite. Adaptation is authorship at its most demanding: the art of finding what a story already wants to become, and giving it a new body without losing its soul.

Nearly every film you love is an adaptation. So is most of the theater that lasts. The work is not to be faithful — faithfulness is easy and dead — but to be true: to carry a novel’s pulse onto a stage, to let a point of view shift and a story reveal a face it has never shown before.

I came to this through a single book. When Joyce Carol Oates granted me the rights to adapt Blonde, I learned everything I know about writing by turning seven hundred pages of Marilyn Monroe into three acts — and by daring to see her through a Mediterranean, Italian, female eye that American versions had never used. That is the gift adaptation gives: not a different plot, but a different perspective. The story we all know, told by the voice it was missing.

This is what I teach. How to read a source until it gives up its secret. How to choose the lens only you can bring. How to move a manuscript toward the stage, the page, or the screen — and how to trust your own point of view enough to make something that did not exist before.