As with any medium, it is simply a matter of requiring the right artist to tell the right story. There are plenty of novels that would be very, very challenging to adapt to film, which would require a very particular sort of filmmaker to do well. But there are also brilliant, talented filmmakers out there who are perfectly capable of understanding the intricacies of any such novel, and translating that novel appropriately into this other medium. Books and films are inherently very different modes of storytelling, and a common fallacy is for literary fans to confuse “good adaptation” with “absolutely faithful to every word, detail, and structural component of a novel.” No film is ever going to perfectly mimic the experience of reading a book – and no film should. Expecting an adaptation to do this is to lack imagination, and to misunderstand the storytelling strengths of each medium. In adapting a story to such a different style of storytelling, a filmmakerexplore the new dimensions and new possibilities that this different medium offers. A film adaptation should enrich and enhance the experience of a novel while working well as a piece of art on its own; not just act as a glorified audiobook with pictures. And even when a novel may strongly resist a literal word-for-word, moment-for-moment translation to the screen, a thoughtful, creative, insightful adaptation is possible for even the most difficult source material in the hands of a filmmaker who understands it. If the notoriously dense and difficult James Joyce (John Huston's) or the fiercely logic-defying and non-narrative William S. Burroughs (David Cronenberg's) can be successfully brought to the screen, then surely anything is possible.