Whalefall: fifty flashbacks down to five
Novelist and screenwriter Daniel Kraus told The Talks that adapting Whalefall meant treating compression as the fun of the job, not the wound. The novel leapt into about fifty flashbacks; the film got roughly five. The hardest writing problem was condensing everything Jay learned from his father so it arrived at the exact moment he needed it.
Kraus draws a useful line: changing a novel because an editor asked and you did not fight still bothers him years later. Changing a novel because a movie cannot be eight hours is a different contract, closer to the puzzle of a comic: finite pages, structural rules, say a lot with as little as possible.
That is the adaptation craft most audiences never see. The flashbacks that survive are not the most lyrical ones. They are the ones that pay off when the character is out of air.
Go deeper on Kingdom of Dreams
- → EP 335: Pietro Scalia on editing Whalefall
- → EP 266: Gary Goldman on writing Total Recall
- → EP 328: Bob Gale on writing the Back to the Future trilogy
We have not sat with Daniel Kraus yet. Go deeper with writers and with Pietro Scalia, who cut Whalefall for the screen.
Headline inspired by reporting at The Talks (Emma Robertson's interview with Daniel Kraus). Full article remains on their site; this page is our craft lens and episode guide. Read the source at The Talks ↗