Literature & cinema21 pairings · 8 categories

From Page
to Screen

The stories we read. The worlds we watched.

A book and its film are two arguments about the same characters. This archive pairs them honestly: what the novel does with language, what the camera does instead, and which of the two you should meet first. Direct adaptations are labelled — works merely inspired by another book are labelled differently, because they are not the same thing.

← The literature library Devices on screen →Theme dictionary →

21 pairingsReading the book first

01Direct adaptationShakespeareRomance & drama

Cover of Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare

1996 · dir. Baz Luhrmann

Romeo and Juliet

William Shakespeare · 1597

Two teenagers from feuding families marry in secret, and a series of near-misses kills them both. The play that made romantic tragedy a genre of speed.

Romeo + Juliet

1996 · dir. Baz Luhrmann

Verona Beach, guns stamped 'Sword', a television news bulletin for a prologue. Shakespeare's verse survives the gunfire, which surprises people expecting a museum piece.

Cast · Leonardo DiCaprio · Claire Danes · John Leguizamo · Pete Postlethwaite

15971996399 years later

Did you know? The prologue is delivered as a TV news report, and the leads were cast deliberately young — Danes was sixteen.

02Direct adaptationShakespeare

Cover of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark by William Shakespeare

1996 · dir. Kenneth Branagh

Hamlet, Prince of Denmark

William Shakespeare · 1603

A prince is told by a ghost that his uncle murdered his father, and then thinks about it — for four acts, in front of everyone, while the court watches him back.

Hamlet

1996 · dir. Kenneth Branagh

The first unabridged film Hamlet, shot in 70mm with every line of the Folio text — a Victorian palace epic with mirrors in every room.

Cast · Kenneth Branagh · Kate Winslet · Derek Jacobi · Julie Christie

16031996393 years later

Did you know? At just over four hours it remains the only major Hamlet film to use the complete text; the mirror scene was shot in a single take.

03Direct adaptationClassic novelsRomance & drama

Cover of Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen

2005 · dir. Joe Wright

Pride and Prejudice

Jane Austen · 1813

Elizabeth Bennet and Mr Darcy take an instant dislike to each other in a county where marriage is the only career on offer. Austen lets two proud people correct themselves slowly, in public, at other people's expense.

Pride & Prejudice

2005 · dir. Joe Wright

Wright turns Austen into long takes: a hand flexing, a dawn walk across a field, a house you fall in love with before you like the man who owns it.

Cast · Keira Knightley · Matthew Macfadyen · Rosamund Pike · Brenda Blethyn

18132005192 years later

Did you know? The famous tracking shot through the Bennet house was lit only with candles and daylight, and it ends on a pig in the hall.

04Direct adaptationClassic novelsRomance & drama

2020 · dir. Autumn de Wilde

Emma

Jane Austen · 1815

A rich, clever, bored young woman arranges other people's marriages and gets almost everything wrong. Austen's most perfect plot and her least likeable heroine.

Emma.

2020 · dir. Autumn de Wilde

De Wilde reads Emma as a spoiled aesthete and the film as a confection: pastel, symmetrical, faintly cruel, with a village of gossips in every mirror.

Cast · Anya Taylor-Joy · Johnny Flynn · Bill Nighy · Mia Goth

18152020205 years later

Did you know? The title's full stop is part of the joke, and the costumes were built from period patterns in a deliberately sweet palette.

05Direct adaptationGothic & horror

Cover of Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus by Mary Shelley

1931 · dir. James Whale

Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus

Mary Shelley · 1818

A student assembles a living being, is horrified by it, and abandons it. The creature teaches himself language, reads Paradise Lost, and asks his maker for one thing: company.

Frankenstein

1931 · dir. James Whale

Whale's film invents the flat head, the bolts and the criminal brain — and turns a philosophical novel into a visual poem about a misunderstood child.

Cast · Colin Clive · Boris Karloff · Mae Clarke · Dwight Frye

18181931113 years later

Did you know? The bolts appear nowhere in Shelley. The look was built by Jack Pierce with Boris Karloff, who refused to speak in the role.

06Direct adaptationClassic novelsRomance & dramaGothic & horror

2011 · dir. Cary Fukunaga

Jane Eyre

Charlotte Brontë · 1847

An orphan with no money, no beauty and no connections insists on being treated as an equal — by a house, by a man, and by a God she argues with. The first great novel of a woman's interior life.

Jane Eyre

2011 · dir. Cary Fukunaga

Fukunaga shoots the moors as weather systems and Thornfield as a cold, wet machine. The gothic is visual and physical rather than narrated.

Cast · Mia Wasikowska · Michael Fassbender · Judi Dench · Jamie Bell

18472011164 years later

Did you know? The film opens with Jane fleeing Thornfield across the moor — an event that happens two-thirds of the way into the book.

07Direct adaptationClassic novelsRomance & dramaGothic & horror

Cover of Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë

2011 · dir. Andrea Arnold

Wuthering Heights

Emily Brontë · 1847

A foundling and a landowner's daughter destroy each other and then their children, on a moor that seems to be doing the haunting itself. The most violent love story in English, and the least consoling.

Wuthering Heights

2011 · dir. Andrea Arnold

Arnold strips out the narrators, most of the dialogue and all of the comfort. Hand-held 4:3, mud, breath, wind — a love story told like a wildlife documentary.

Cast · Kaya Scodelario · James Howson · Solomon Glave · Shannon Beer

18472011164 years later

Did you know? It was shot on the Yorkshire moors with almost no musical score and a great deal of real rain.

08Direct adaptationClassic novelsRomance & drama

Cover of Little Women by Louisa May Alcott

2019 · dir. Greta Gerwig

Little Women

Louisa May Alcott · 1868

Four sisters grow up poor, ambitious and inventive in wartime New England. Alcott wrote it fast, for money, and accidentally produced the American novel about girls becoming artists.

Little Women

2019 · dir. Greta Gerwig

Gerwig intercuts adolescence and adulthood so that growing up is felt as loss and relief at once, and lets Jo argue with her own ending.

Cast · Saoirse Ronan · Florence Pugh · Emma Watson · Timothée Chalamet

18682019151 years later

Did you know? The warm, remembered colour grade and 35mm texture were chosen so the past would feel recalled rather than reconstructed.

09Direct adaptationGothic & horrorClassic novels

Cover of The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde

1945 · dir. Albert Lewin

The Picture of Dorian Gray

Oscar Wilde · 1890

A beautiful young man wishes his portrait would age instead of him, and then lives exactly as he likes while the painting keeps the receipts. A comedy of manners that happens to be a horror story.

The Picture of Dorian Gray

1945 · dir. Albert Lewin

Elegant black and white, punctured by a Technicolor portrait. Lewin adds a moralising narrator Wilde never wrote and makes the wit into a warning.

Cast · Hurd Hatfield · George Sanders · Angela Lansbury · Donna Reed

1890194555 years later

Did you know? The colour insert of the painting was hand-painted by Lewin himself. Ivan Albright's portrait now hangs in the Art Institute of Chicago.

10Inspired by another workClassic novelsModern

Cover of Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad

1979 · dir. Francis Ford Coppola

Heart of Darkness

Joseph Conrad · 1899

A riverboat captain travels up the Congo to retrieve a company agent who has become a god to the people he was sent to exploit. A short, dense, deliberately uncomfortable novella about complicity.

Apocalypse Now

1979 · dir. Francis Ford Coppola

The Congo becomes the Mekong, Marlow becomes Captain Willard, Kurtz becomes a rogue colonel. Not an adaptation but a transposition — the shape kept, the subject replaced.

Cast · Martin Sheen · Marlon Brando · Robert Duvall · Frederic Forrest

1899197980 years later

Did you know? The ending was shot without a finished script. Brando arrived having not read the novella, and the production ran so long it became its own documentary.

11Direct adaptationClassic novels

Cover of The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

2013 · dir. Baz Luhrmann

The Great Gatsby

F. Scott Fitzgerald · 1925

A bootlegger invents a self to win a girl who is already married to old money, and throws parties for a woman who never comes. Nick watches, and learns what the light at the end of the dock costs.

The Great Gatsby

2013 · dir. Baz Luhrmann

Luhrmann stages the parties as hip-hop spectacle in 3D, and frames the whole story as Nick's therapy. Excess as argument, not decoration.

Cast · Leonardo DiCaprio · Carey Mulligan · Tobey Maguire · Joel Edgerton

1925201388 years later

Did you know? Fitzgerald considered calling it Under the Red, White and Blue. The cover's drifting eyes were painted before the novel was finished.

12Direct adaptationGothic & horrorClassic novelsRomance & drama

1940 · dir. Alfred Hitchcock

Rebecca

Daphne du Maurier · 1938

A young, poor companion marries a widower and arrives at Manderley to find the first wife still running the house through her housekeeper. A novel about a woman with no money, no name and no options.

Rebecca

1940 · dir. Alfred Hitchcock

Hitchcock tightens the gothic into a thriller, adds the smoking monogram 'R', and turns a study of guilt into a study of exposure — with one of cinema's great performances of menace.

Cast · Laurence Olivier · Joan Fontaine · Judith Anderson · George Sanders

193819402 years later

Did you know? The Hays Office rejected the first script; the accidental-death compromise satisfied censors and infuriated readers of the novel.

13Direct adaptationDystopia & sci-fi

Cover of Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell

1984 · dir. Michael Radford

Nineteen Eighty-Four

George Orwell · 1949

A minor party functionary in a surveillance state commits the crime of keeping a diary, falling in love, and thinking a sentence to its end. The century's manual for recognising authoritarian language.

Nineteen Eighty-Four

1984 · dir. Michael Radford

Shot in London in the actual months the novel depicts, using real grey streets, telescreens and queues — and the first film to keep the novel's ending.

Cast · John Hurt · Suzanna Hamilton · Richard Burton · Cyril Cusack

1949198435 years later

Did you know? Richard Burton died shortly after finishing the role of O'Brien, and the film's production design borrowed heavily from postwar Britain.

14Direct adaptationFantasyClassic novels

Cover of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by C. S. Lewis

2005 · dir. Andrew Adamson

The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe

C. S. Lewis · 1950

Four evacuated children walk through a wardrobe into a country held in perpetual winter by a witch, and are enlisted in a story that is also an allegory, whether they notice or not.

The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe

2005 · dir. Andrew Adamson

A full-scale adventure film with a wartime prologue, a bigger battle and a witch played with terrifying poise — the allegory softened into allusion.

Cast · Tilda Swinton · Georgie Henley · Skandar Keynes · James McAvoy

1950200555 years later

Did you know? The film's winter was shot in the Czech Republic and New Zealand; Tilda Swinton's fur collar did most of the acting.

15Direct adaptationFantasy

Cover of The Lord of the Rings by J. R. R. Tolkien

2001–2003 · dir. Peter Jackson

The Lord of the Rings

J. R. R. Tolkien · 1954

A hobbit inherits a ring that is also a weapon, and walks it across a continent to the one place it can be destroyed. A war story written as a lament, with songs in it.

The Lord of the Rings

2001–2003 · dir. Peter Jackson

Three films shot as one production in New Zealand, treating fantasy with total sincerity: no wink, no irony, no apology.

Cast · Elijah Wood · Ian McKellen · Viggo Mortensen · Cate Blanchett

19542001–200347 years later

Did you know? The trilogy was shot as a single production, and Ian McKellen had never read the books before being cast as Gandalf.

16Direct adaptationClassic novelsModern

Cover of To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee

1962 · dir. Robert Mulligan

To Kill a Mockingbird

Harper Lee · 1960

A white lawyer defends a Black man falsely accused in a small Alabama town, and his children learn that their neighbours are polite and unjust at the same time.

To Kill a Mockingbird

1962 · dir. Robert Mulligan

Mulligan keeps the camera low, at a child's height, and lets a courtroom full of faces do the argument. Peck's stillness became the image of decency on film.

Cast · Gregory Peck · Mary Badham · Phillip Alford · Brock Peters

196019622 years later

Did you know? Peck won the Oscar and stayed friends with Harper Lee for life. Truman Capote, her childhood friend, was the model for Dill.

17Direct adaptationGothic & horror

1980 · dir. Stanley Kubrick

The Shining

Stephen King · 1977

A recovering alcoholic takes a winter job as caretaker of an empty hotel with his wife and psychic son. The ghosts arrive after the family has already begun to come apart.

The Shining

1980 · dir. Stanley Kubrick

Kubrick removes the psychology and keeps the geometry: impossible corridors, a maze in the snow, a performance of madness that begins at full volume.

Cast · Jack Nicholson · Shelley Duvall · Danny Lloyd · Scatman Crothers

197719803 years later

Did you know? The hedge maze does not exist in the novel. Duvall has described the shoot as the hardest work of her career.

18Direct adaptationTelevisionDystopia & sci-fi

Cover of The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood

2017– · dir. Created by Bruce Miller (series)

The Handmaid's Tale

Margaret Atwood · 1985

In a theocratic America, a woman is assigned to bear children for a commander and his wife. Offred's testimony is quiet, dry, and full of jokes — which is what makes it unbearable.

The Handmaid's Tale

2017– · dir. Created by Bruce Miller (series)

Television expands a single testimony into an ongoing resistance, and gives the regime a visual grammar: red cloaks, white bonnets, grey streets.

Cast · Elisabeth Moss · Yvonne Strahovski · Ann Dowd · Joseph Fiennes

19852017–32 years later

Did you know? Atwood insisted every atrocity in the novel had a historical precedent. The series' costume designer made the red cloak the show's icon.

19Direct adaptationFantasyModern

Cover of Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone by J. K. Rowling

2001–2011 · dir. Chris Columbus, Alfonso Cuarón, Mike Newell, David Yates

Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone

J. K. Rowling · 1997

An unwanted boy discovers he is famous in a world he has never seen, and goes to a school where the corridors are more dangerous than the curriculum. Seven books, one long education in loss.

Harry Potter (film series)

2001–2011 · dir. Chris Columbus, Alfonso Cuarón, Mike Newell, David Yates

Eight films that grow up with their cast. The third film resets the visual language — colder, handheld, autumnal — and the series becomes about adolescence, not plot.

Cast · Daniel Radcliffe · Emma Watson · Rupert Grint · Alan Rickman

19972001–20114 years later

Did you know? The series runs over nineteen hours. Alan Rickman was told Snape's secret by Rowling years before the final scripts were written.

20Direct adaptationModern

Cover of The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky

2012 · dir. Stephen Chbosky

The Perks of Being a Wallflower

Stephen Chbosky · 1999

A shy boy writes letters about his first year of high school: friends, first love, a teacher who lends him books, and a memory he cannot yet look at directly.

The Perks of Being a Wallflower

2012 · dir. Stephen Chbosky

The author adapting his own novel seventeen years later, choosing warmth over the book's guarded fragility — the letters become voice-over and the film becomes kinder.

Cast · Logan Lerman · Emma Watson · Ezra Miller · Mae Whitman

1999201213 years later

Did you know? Chbosky wrote the screenplay himself. The tunnel scene was shot using a real road tunnel approached as practically as possible.

21Direct adaptationModern

2013 · dir. Brian Percival

The Book Thief

Markus Zusak · 2005

Death narrates the story of a girl in Nazi Germany who steals books, learns to read from a kind stepfather, and hides a Jewish man in the basement. A formally daring novel told by a tired witness.

The Book Thief

2013 · dir. Brian Percival

A warm, well-made family film about decency under fascism — and a considerable flattening of a novel narrated by Death.

Cast · Sophie Nélisse · Geoffrey Rush · Emily Watson · Nico Liersch

200520138 years later

Did you know? The cast learned rudimentary German for the schoolroom scenes, and the film was shot largely in Germany.

How to use this archive

Read one, watch the other, then argue.

A film cannot reproduce a novel's interior monologue, and a novel cannot give you a face at the moment of a decision. That trade is not a failure — it is the material. Open any pairing to drag the comparison line, read what the director changed, and see how other versions of the same book made different choices.

About the images

Every pairing shows the book's jacket — often a first-edition plate — beside the poster or title card of its screen version, both drawn from Wikipedia's public image archive and shown for study and commentary. Where an image cannot load, an original typographic plate stands in.

The archive is built from records rather than hard-coded cards, so new pairings can be added without redesigning the page.