Never one to downplay the power of film, Stanley Kubrick once said that “almost every novel could be successfully adapted”. He carried this confidence into his own filmmaking, working not from original screenplays, but from adaptations of novels as different as William Makepeace Thackeray’s historical romp Barry Lyndon (1844) and Vladimir Nabokov’s erotic fantasy Lolita (1955).
Even Kubrick, however, allowed for the possibility of unfilmable fiction. Any novel can be adapted, he said, “provided it is not one whose artistic integrity is lost along with its length”.
