For a man who wrote an entire movie about how awful adapting a book into a movie can be, Charlie Kaufman has really developed it into a unique skill. The Oscar-winning screenwriter is best known for original stories like Being John Malkovich and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, but he’s recently branched out and adapted a children’s book into the surprisingly cerebral animated movie Orion and the Dark.
Even both of his upcoming projects are adaptations, one of The Memory Police by Yōko Ogawa and another of Iddo Gefen’s short story “Debby’s Beach House.” All these projects can be traced back to one of Kaufman’s finest achievements: a seemingly impossible adaptation that took an inscrutable book and turned it into a hauntingly beautiful thriller that hid its secrets in plain sight.
