As he’s been prone to do, Patriot-News reporter Chris Mautner has posted an extended “director’s cut” version of his interview with Marjane Satrapi over at his Panels & Pixels blog. They discuss Iran, her new book Chicken with Plums and the upcoming animated version of Persepolis:
Q: How closely does it adhere to the original graphic novel?
A: Well it’s extremely close actually. The narration in the movie is very, very different to the narration in the comic. Absolutely not the same way of telling the story so to make it as a movie we had to add some information of course. But we also had to take out some information because you can not do everything. If you count in a very mathematical way each page of comic respond to one minute of a movie. This comic is about 380 pages so we could not make a movie of more than six hours, it’s impossible.
But we tried really to put the whole thing in there. … With the soundtrack, with the voices, everything takes a dimension that you don’t have. But it’s very close and true to it. .. All of it is actually in there.
Near the end of the interview, he starts off a question by telling Satrapi he has a “comic nerd” question to ask … I thought he was going to ask whose side she was on in Civil War.
October 31st, 2006 at 7:37 am
The extracted answer you posted here makes me laugh. It seems that, on the one hand, the movie version is “extremely close” and “all of it is actually there”. Yet, on the other hand, the “narration in the movie is very, very different” and they had to “add some… [and] take out some information”.
So is all of it there or has some information been taken out? Is it close or different?
October 31st, 2006 at 11:18 am
What I think she was trying to say was that all the major plot points from the book are in the film, but the method of narration, of telling the story, is quite different.
October 31st, 2006 at 11:41 am
I know. It just amused me the way it’s written. Saying you’ve taken some of the information out and added some other stuff doesn’t help.
And it reminded me of a “Making Of” featurette I watched on the Constantine DVD about how the film had the same soul, feel and ideas as the Hellblazer comic but that they changed a few minor points.