Last month, the Harry Potter series reboot was announced as a series. Fans reacted divided, not least because the author JK Rowling, who is conspicuous with her anti-trans statements, will make money from it.
Based on the many euphoric voices on the internet, there are still enough Hogwarts fans looking forward to new old adventures with Harry, Ron and Hermione. But even if you ignore the cause of Rowling (hard enough!), there is an artistic argument against the idea behind the series. A film was screened at the Cannes Film Festival to prove it: the new Martin Scorsese crime epic Killers of the Flower Moon, starring Leonardo DiCaprio.
The Harry Potter series will be a ‘faithful adaptation’
Back to muggles and wizards first. The new series to film all seven books from the Harry Potter series within ten years, that is, the same material as the eight movies that were released between 2001 and 2011. Only with a new cast and different staff behind the scenes. A statement by JK Rowling hinted at how this new adaptation will be approached. In the official announcement of the streaming service Max (formerly HBO Max), she is quoted as saying:
Max’ commitment to maintain the integrity of my booksis important to me and I look forward to being a part of this new adaptation, the one depth and detail will enable, which is only possible in a long-form television series.
In the accompanying tweet, the Harry Potter series was named as “faithful adaptation” praised as if there weren’t eight movies that stick slavishly to the books.
The promise of the series is scary
The notion that a faithful, detailed adaptation of the Harry Potter books, or any book, is automatically preferable is a huge fallacy. There are seven Harry Potter novels that are standalone, complete works and one Adaptation can only succeed if it makes the same claim for itself.
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Films and series that stick to the template are usually doomed to failure because they cannot free themselves from the shadow of the original. In their urge to reproduce elements of a novel, comic book, or video game exactly in another medium, they destroy their own raison d’être. A good adaptation, on the other hand, either extracts the essence of the original by other means or develops it further. A good adaptation doesn’t have a crippling reverence for the “integrity” of the original.
The Leonardo DiCaprio epic Killers of the Flower Moon shows how an adaptation outperforms its original
Martin Scorsese’s new film, which premiered in Cannes last week, is a compelling example of how detaching oneself from the source can bring one closer to its essence.
Killers of the Flower Moon is based on a non-fiction book by David Grann that chronicles the systematic murder of Osage on a reservation in the 1920s. Grann organizes his true crime book like a whodunit. The tension feeds on the question of who the killer is, which Grann only reveals in the second half. You could have made a conventional crime thriller out of it.
Check out the trailer for Killers of the Flower Moon:
Killers of the Flower Moon – Trailer (English) HD
However, Scorsese and co-author Eric Roth turned the structure of the template on its head. They change the perspective of the story and ruthlessly shorten narrative threads. They follow the facts but tell the story from the perspective of the perpetrators. In doing so, they give the material a level of interpretation that the original did not provide. Nevertheless, the film deservedly bears the same original title as the book. Killers of the Flower Moon now exists in two mediums, two versions, each of which can enrich readers and viewers in their own way. Anyone who has read the book will discover something new in the film and vice versa.
The Harry Potter series should learn from the movies
I could name many other examples, such as The Zone of Interest with Sandra Hüller, which was also shown in Cannes, or The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (fortunately Tom Bombadil is missing!), King, Queen, Ace, Spy, Shining, The godfather I and II, and so on. But suffice it to look at the Harry Potter series itself.
In the first two films by Chris Columbus, the atmosphere of the magician stories is wonderfully captured on film, but the screenplays follow the templates like the instructions of a navigation system.
In contrast, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban uses the book’s ingredients much more freely and subdivides them into the dynamic film narrative. The other two films do the preliminary work, however only part 3 captures the essence of the series, which wraps the wonders and horrors of growing up in fantasy stories. So it doesn’t even have to be Scorsese. The series would do well to learn from the best Harry Potter film.
Podcast from Cannes: How good are Indiana Jones 5 and Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon?
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I was a guest on the FILMSTARTS podcast on the screen love and talk to my colleague and Cannes roommate Christoph Petersen about Indiana Jones and the Wheel of Destiny, Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon and Asteroid City by Wes Anderson. Listen up!