Charlie Kaufman shifted from original screenplays to several adaptations, including Orion and the Dark and forthcoming films based on The Memory Police and 'Debby's Beach House.' Kaufman adapted Iain Reid's 2016 novel I'm Thinking of Ending Things, a short horror work that shifts perspective and builds tension through mundane details and sudden twists. The novel experiments with an unreliable narrator and even changes narrators in the audiobook. Kaufman's adaptation distilled the book's abstractions into a haunting, metaphysical film that turns an awkward dinner and a tense road trip into a deeply existential thriller released during early lockdown.
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.
In 2016, Iain Reid published I'm Thinking of Ending Things, a short horror novel that shifted perspective from a woman on a long drive to visit her boyfriend's parents for the first time, and two police officers discussing some mysterious tragedy that occurred. It's a story that's unafraid to spend a whole chapter on the protagonist telling an anecdote about learning to drive, but ends with twist after twist, revealing that the main character isn't at all who we thought.
Collection
[
|
...
]