Why do most great novels fail on screen, while some mediocre ones succeed? Author B Jeyamohan explains

Pune: At a packed auditorium inside Pavilion Mall, far removed from the romantic idea of cinema as a dream factory, author and critic B Jeyamohan, who writes in Tamil as well as Malayalam, delivered a blunt diagnosis of Indian filmmaking. Jeyamohan, who has also written scripts for several movies in the two languages, argued that contemporary cinema has lost its literary spine and now feeds on itself, recycling stories until novelty evaporated.
"Current films are based on other films. The material has been lost. That is why we keep seeing the same kind of cinema. Five or six plot lines are being repeated everywhere. In some films, all five or six are crammed in together," Jeyamohan said at the Vijay Tendulkar Memorial Lecture during the ongoing Pune International Film Festival.The problem, he said, wasn't technology or audience attention spans, but the collapse of storytelling ambition among filmmakers and production houses. "Cinema once drew strength from literature. Now it borrows from yesterday's box office successes. The result is a closed loop of familiarity where nothing genuinely new enters the frame," he said.Jeyamohan also outlined a broad distinction between artistic and commercial novels, arguing that not all serious literature lent itself to cinema. Classical novels, he said, were rich in philosophical debate and cultural detail and represented the highest literary quality, but were extremely difficult to adapt for the screen. Modernist novels, by contrast, were driven by individual characters, inner conflict and contradiction. "These are more suitable for films because they already contain the drama that cinema needs. Commercial novels are often structurally incomplete, but in the hands of a strong director can still be shaped into effective films," he said.Unstructured and heavily fragmented novels fared the worst on screen. "Big artistic novels with broken sentences, fractured personalities and abstract mental spaces do not work in cinema. Commercial novels are incomplete by design. But a good director can turn an incomplete novel into a good film."Jeyamohan, who has repeatedly navigated adaptations, as both novelist and screenwriter, offered a set of unsentimental rules for aspiring screenwriters — "Do not lift content directly from a novel. Do not take the dialogues. Write new and short dialogues. In cinema, scenes matter, not speeches. Philosophical discussions that work on the page will kill a film."He added that only the core of a novel should be retained in a film adaptation. "Take the main character and the drama. Absorb the entire novel and then write the screenplay with scenes in mind. Cinema is a visual form. If the scene doesn't work, nothing works."Jeyamohan, who wrote a 26-part and 22,600-page retelling of the Mahabharata, offered examples of both success and failure from his own career. "I roamed the country as a beggar for two years. I witnessed a murder. From that experience came the novel ‘Ezham Ulagam' and later the film ‘Naan Kadavul'. The novel was released in English as ‘The Abyss'. I wrote a 700-page novel for "Kadal". It failed. Fifteen years later, that same novel was finally published," he said.Jeyamohan also recalled writing the screenplay for Ponniyin Selvan, which was adapted from Kalki's epic novel of the same name, strengthening his belief that adaptation is an act of transformation and not just translation.