Information & Media eISSN 2783-6207
2023, vol. 96, pp. 8–20 DOI: https://doi.org/10.15388/Im.2023.96.62
Caleb Theodar
Department of English Vel Tech Rangarajan Dr Sagunthala R&D Institute of Science and Technology, Chennai, TN, India
calebtheodar@gmail.com
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4275-6266
Saranya P
Department of English Vel Tech Rangarajan Dr Sagunthala R&D Institute of Science and Technology, Chennai, TN, India
saranya@veltech.edu.in
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3545-7145
Abstract. This research mainly explores the connection between Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code, with the filmmaker’s cinematic depiction of literature. Ron Howard as an adaptation director in the Hollywood industry is evaluated in the context of his auteurism and examined his approach of repudiating a substantial portion of the Catholic secrets which dodged the predicament of fidelity, a core of conventional Film Adaptation. Disregarding the controversy, fidelity is indeed a deliberate action overtly brought by the auteurist vision resulting from screenwriting. This article explores the modern implications of screenwriting on auteurist function, aiming at how Hollywood’s conception of the director’s auteurism in cinema works and the film’s artistic approaches from the novel to the screenplay. This study illustrates that the adaptation highlights the author’s and his work’s superiority yet emphasises the director’s technique as inevitable during the transposition.
Keywords: Director’s Cinema; Auteur Theory; Screenwriting; Adapted Screenplay; Film Adaptation.
Santrauka. Šiuo tyrimu siekiama atskleisti ryšį tarp Dano Browno „Da Vinčio kodo“ ir kino kūrėjo kinematografinio literatūros vaizdavimo. Ronas Howardas, kaip Holivudo industrijos adaptacijos režisierius, yra vertinamas autorinio kino kontekste ir dėl jo požiūrio į nemažos dalies katalikiškų paslapčių atsisakymą, kurios išsprendė ištikimybės, kaip įprasto filmų adaptacijos branduolio, keblią padėtį. Nepaisant kontroversiškumo, ištikimybė iš tikrųjų yra sąmoningas veiksmas, kurį atvirai sukelia autorinio kino vizija, atsirandanti dėl rašomo scenarijaus. Šiame straipsnyje nagrinėjama šiuolaikinė scenarijų rašymo reikšmė autoriniam kinui, siekiant išsiaiškinti, kaip veikia Holivudo samprata apie režisieriaus autorystę kine ir filmo meninį požiūrį nuo romano iki scenarijaus. Šis tyrimas atskleidžia, kad adaptacija išryškina autoriaus ir jo kūrinio pranašumą, bei pabrėžia režisieriaus meistriškumą kaip neišvengiamą faktorių perkeliant romaną į scenarijų.
Pagrindiniai žodžiai: režisieriaus kinas; autorinio kino teorija; scenarijaus rašymas; adaptuotas scenarijus; filmo adaptacija.
Received: 2022-08-13. Accepted: 2023-01-27.
Copyright © 2023 Caleb Theodar, Saranya P. Published by Vilnius University Press. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Licence, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Dan Brown’s novel adaptations are some of the finest products of Hollywood cinema that offer a peculiar visual experience. The deceptive confluence of belief and wisdom, archival relativism, sacred hypocrisy, the issue of overpopulation, and a few more controversial premises are the topics the movie confronts. The components that are altered to reflect the film medium and those carried over from the novel are noticeable in the adaptation. Some of the characters, ideas, storyline, narration, and background are changed from the narrative’s form to the image, albeit both the book and the movie behave as fundamentally individual crafts. Dan Brown’s novel also introduces elements of uncertainty which drive readers to read till the end throughout the night, aspiring to rescue humanity by the main character Langdon. Imagining minuscule details and driving the narrative in a thrilling sense of suspense with melodramatic scenes could take readers to a realm of unimaginable terror and mystery when they are reading novels.
Retelling the same tale using images, noises, and hues with a captivating narration makes the characters spring to life on film. The genre of Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code falls under the Conspiracy-Mystery Fiction novel prevalent in postmodern literature due to its constructed structure. The novel was best portrayed by Ron Howard, with the same name, which was released on May 19, 2006. Akiva Goldsman’s screenplay did a fantastic job of adapting the book, and it merits a spot among the blockbusters. The adaptation has a running time of 140 minutes. The plot includes a heart-pounding whodunnit, riddles and cyphers, ancient mysteries; and a variety of conspiracies, entailing the Holy Grail secrecy and the Priory of Sion (Prieure de Sion). Like the subject of the novel, fiction is more convincing than reality because of the reshaping of the character made by the adapter. Many expected that the adapter would focus on the story like the author instead, the adapter spent more for an intriguing climax with dramatic plot twists, in order to engage the audience.
The film is reinvented into an entirely unique piece of artwork developed by completely different creators, but still linked to and somewhat far from its original story. It is absurd to compare the novel and its adaptation just because they are different. The film may stand on its own as a novel and unique work of art because it has a wide range of perspectives. The author of the novel has complete control over the reader’s perception, whereas in cinema, the filmmaker, casts, cinematographer, compiler, and few more work together in producing the whole adventure. Similarly, Susan Sontag identified how various artistic forms impact the viewer’s or reader’s attention (2009). Compared to the novel, a film provides us with a glimpse of the narrative that is always and completely in the director’s or screenwriter’s hands. Our focus must wander around the screen as it does on the page. The audience’s pace moves whenever the camera moves and stays motionless when it is still. The reading and viewing experiences in The Da Vinci Code novel and film are signified by strong attention to the exegetical narratives and the emotional reactions. However, speed and immersion are combined in his story. Brown tricks the reader with the complexity of words, while Howard visually mesmerises the viewer with each micro-sequence, and skillfully surprises them with the intellectual and cryptographical intricacy of the narrative.
This study discusses the disparity of narrative-adapted screenplay based on the perceptions that the story is generated and constrained by space and time, whereas the screenplay has a ‘code of visual arrangement’. A critic cannot underestimate a filmmaker’s intentions only if the artistic goal tends to modify the source material as precisely as feasible. But one can not generalise cinematic narrative and skill of media transposition based on the correlation of the adapted movie to its source material. Similar to how paintings and plays give their backgrounds for us to consider in whichever sequence we like, novels present concepts and details, pertinent to the author’s notion, and carry them systematically with the author’s leads. The Director’s Cinema plays a key role in portraying a multitude of narrative concepts through textual and visual elements. Although they can be conceptually divided into image, audio, and text, they are mostly interrelated and complementing. Howard made alterations with close attention to detail to save time and create a ‘standalone movie.’ In an interview with Bustle, Howard informs about obscuring structural changes made to the original work because Dan Brown’s books are first-hand thrillers and would require five to six hours of screen time if they were adapted properly (Truffaut-Wong, 2016). The work of screenwriter Akiva Goldsman is vital in this transition as it lays the block in the plot for the director to build his vision. This research focuses on the concept of director’s cinema by widening the impact of eclectic auteur influences from a text-based screenplay method and by integrating traditional approaches of film adaptation theory.
The text serves as a vehicle for expressing cultural elements (such as those found in painting, sculpture, literature, music, etc.) with which we can engage in in-depth intermedial analysis. The filmic version of The Da Vinci Code is labelled as one such artistic creation in a digital recreation.
Film adaptations are construed as creative works that show the transformation of a literature into a movie while adhering to the original work or otherwise redefining ideas from it. Belton rationalises that the process of adaptation gives directors the chance to interpret a storyline out of a different period’s work from the lens of their present time and extrapolate their own worldview upon that storyline (2003, p. 195). The correlations between a novel and a film are in the author’s narrative intentions and the filmmaker’s cinematic objective. Joseph Conrad makes a declaration about his aims as a novelist, stating that his goal is to use the potential of written words to forge a medium that lets us hear, experience, and most importantly, visualise (1897). Adaptation is viewed as a type of artistic endeavour by certain academics and artists. Famous screenwriter De Witt Bodeen remarks in his book The Adapting Art that shifting literary works into movies is undoubtedly a creative endeavour, yet it also needs a certain amount of specific perception as well as the capacity to reproduce and maintain a set atmosphere (1963, p. 349).
Recent adaptation theory has made an effort to conceptualise and evaluate the idea of screenwriting and directorial influence in order to understand how this involves and affects media transposition from the text. As many ideological settings prioritise the source text, George Bluestone illustrated a plethora of popular adaptation studies of the texts, built to disprove and specifically criticise such research methods as pseudoscientific and pretentious (1957). Famous adaptation theories of Deborah Cartmell and Imelda Whelehan (1999, 2010), Kamilla Elliott (2003), Robert Stam (2004), Thomas Leitch (2005, 2007), Linda Hutcheon (2006), Christine Geraghty (2008), and Simone Murray (2011), and few more challenged the predominance of fidelity in discourse. The working material for the adaptation is usually derived from literature under a correlative paradigm that emphasises the effect of that literary source. Approaching the material with visual fidelity for adaptation by investigating and analysing the media content (such as a movie, television programme, play, etc.) has been categorically rejected in modern adaptation studies (Sherry, 2016, p. 12). While this compare-and-contrast method might teach us a lot about a specific adaptation endeavour, it frequently falls short of exploring or illuminating more expansive and all-encompassing ideas of adapting to modern media culture. It is indeed challenging to locate any modern academic articles on adaptation that do not systematically propagandise the numerous flaws of a research paradigm that assigns inherent significance to an original work nor which employs fidelity or similarity in deciding its successful adaptation.
The film director is considered to be a creative artist with a distinct aesthetic whose personal and innovative directorial influence, equates him/her to the Film’s author. When American critic Andrew Sarris first used the phrase “auteur theory,” the notion of “auteurism” emerged as an undefined concept in the late 1940s in French film criticism. Its roots were in the critical philosophies of Andre Bazin and Alexandre Astruc (Sarris, 1962, pp. 62-64). A director’s auteur influence is centred on their stance and work strategies as on their artistic aspirations or any textual attributes of their films, in accordance with the careers of three acknowledged auteurs whose bodies of work were almost entirely adaptations: Alfred Hitchcock, Stanley Kubrick, and Walt Disney.
Shah Ahmed et al. (2020) in their article “Adaptation and Auteurism in South Asian Studies with Reference to Rabindranath Tagore’s Works on Screen” commented the key distinction made by auteurists between metteurs-en-scene, or elements like screenplay, language, music, and actors, and mise-en-scène, or the significant part of a scene for the director’s creative approach. They refer to the mise-en-scène as the form or the strength of a film, whilst the metteurs-en-scene as the content or subject matter. They claim that a film’s strength mostly comes from its form, which is inspired by the filmmaker’s technical skill and inner meaning, rather than from its subject, which the director merely employs as stage setters for his objectives. They emphasise that the auteur selects the topic to improve their technical and artistic creations.
To a cinephile, the descriptive and interpretive textual association has been significantly impacted by the auteur’s imprint on the film version. Semenza (2016) in his article “Introduction Shakespeare and the Auteurs: Rethinking Adaptation through the Director’s Cinema”, focuses on the key tenets of Sarris’ segmentation of the auteur theory. While deluding the viewer into thinking that this author already exists in a clearly discernible form free from the contending factors of cinematographers, producers, screenwriters, actors, and other collaborators, he actively encourages the viewer to construct an impression of an ‘author’ out of an infinite number of conceivable factions and structures.
The film was ‘written’ with the camera as much as it was with words on a page. According to Boozer, the adapted script is the principal instrument for media transposition. He also infers that the composition of the transmedial screenplay, which is the most constant and significant example of intertextuality at work, has drawn more attention to intertextual and intermedial influences in adaptation during the past two decades. Screenwriting for adaptations involves rearranging words and imagery using visual elements, illustrations, and prototypes rather than simply words alone. (2008, p.24)
Dagmar Brunow (2022) in his article “Towards an archival study of screenplay versions: the role of screenwriting research for adaptation studies” claims the often-overlooked artistic process involved in producing film adaptations is highlighted through scrutinising screenplay revisions, sketches, and letters. It aims to bridge the gap between research on screenwriting and research on adaptation.
In the article “Adaptation studies through screenwriting studies: Transitionality and the adapted screenplay” (2016) by Jamie Sherry, he makes the claim that through exchanging and discussing ideas, the disciplines of study of adaptation theory and screenplay theory can both gain information about the intertextuality of the adapted screenplay. This approach clarifies how the relationship between the adapted screenplay and film challenges conventional notions of authorship in the adaptation by refocusing the reader on the numerous film practitioners involved in the process, particularly the screenwriter.
The hypothesis of this paper comprehends the novel-film transposition with the inference that literature uses cinematic language to create visual, filmic stories that may be studied, while the usage of literary, narratological elements in cinema is also expressed. But an adapted screenplay typically lacks the intricate first-person character psychologies, language, and emotion that literature generally excels in. Literary medium conveys and implies the visual form by its very nature of the text, however, but it lacks the intrinsic satisfaction that comes with enjoying the cinematic audiovisual grandeur of film. The substratum of this research uses the concepts of screenplay and auteur theory as a foundation to study film adaptation in contemporary Hollywood and popular culture by integrating them into the cinematic discourse. The research has two goals: to advance adaptation studies by emphasising screenwriting as a primal role in transmediation and a base component for the director’s creative filmmaking as well as to elevate the significance of the director in the production, distribution, and predicting the reception of his adaptation technique in industrial contexts. This paper claims that studying the adaptation through the lens of Directorial Cinema’s auteur theory along with screenwriting helps to sieve the compatibility and close the gap between the authorship and intertextuality in the artistic process of the film adaptation.
The study of adaptation favours research of static, canonical works above creative expression generally oriented toward the collective novel and its adaptation phase, rather than the adapted screenplay that lies between them. The widespread application of fidelity has highlighted ownership issues in particular as well as disputed the primacy by acknowledging the numerous intermediaries that have an impact on adaptations. This relocation of the authority of the book and author is instrumental for screenplay studies because it inevitably stimulates the study of the adapted screenplay. Studies on adaptation characterise adaptation as a process that differs from the source material by recognising the screenwriting as an improvised and intervening element during the adaptation. The screenplay has traditionally been seen as a useful tool for facilitating and directing a film, as well as a ‘prototype’ or ‘worksheet’ that professionals can use though not precisely follow.
The paucity of adaptation theorists’ critiques on the screenwriters is greatly astounding, considering the script’s vital role in the transition and its prominence in several classic adaptation methodologies. Bluestone relevantly used the reworked screenwriting in connecting the film to the novel and charting the ambiguity:
By evolving an exact record of alterations, deletions and additions of characters, events, and dialogue, I was able to reduce subjective impressions to a minimum. The method calls for viewing the film with a shooting script at hand. During the viewing, notations of any final changes in the editing were entered into the script. After the script had become an accurate account of the movie’s final print, it was then superimposed on the novel. (1957; ix)
Modern adaptation theories provide constructive paradigms for challenging ideas of authorship, power, and framework in screenwriting. In order to help researchers of both adaptation studies and screenplay studies better comprehend the special position of the adapted screenplay, consider the adapted screenplay as an interstitial text–a liminal entity that lies between two modalities of storytelling. The screenplay functions as an intermedial, bridging the text in adapted works as well as a mechanism of transference to facilitate the conversion of one media form into another, and it also serves as a work that oscillates between the source and its target media. The use of the scene’s environment (place and time), along with sporadic information about different camera angles and cuts, is a common practice in screenplay construction. Plotting, narrating, dialogue, and other ambiguous aspects of the novel are separated from the screenplay before it undergoes a marginal phase where it is conceptualised and written, and it is then used throughout the post-liminal filmmaking phase. (Sherry, 2014, p.86)
The portion in the novel where Langdon and Sophie discuss their ‘treasure hunt’ is altered in the film. The novel has them discussing ideas and facts about the clue while travelling in a cab, whereas the film sets it in a park. The alteration in location is a subset of the screenplay’s construction. Considering the significance of the literature to be presented, such as the explanations and flashbacks of Priory of Sion, the screenwriter expanded the scope of the scene from the cab to a wider setting, which was structured by the director’s creative insights. Sophie’s relationship with her grandfather is another framework for the filmmaker to construct. The narrative has references and flashbacks of Sophie with her grandfather in most of the chapters, which, when adapted to visuals, will dull the viewer. As a solution, the scriptwriter limits the frequency of glimpses in the film to seconds. The screenwriter of The Da Vinci Code, Akiva Goldsman, excels at the multiplicity of aspects to consider when converting a text to a visual.
The propensity to amplify the impact of the intermedial script and to temper its limited role is one of the most challenging attributes to reorient adaptation studies the screenplay and screenwriting approach. For many, the adapted screenplay serves as an impartial guide that outlines the decisions adopted before the transposition. Boozer stresses that “it is the screenplay, not the source text, that is the most direct foundation and fulcrum for any adapted film” (2008, p.4). Maras view scriptwriting as an alternative to the prevalent ‘script as blueprint’ approach, which encompasses:
a broader understanding of the ‘creative process’, and the multiple forms of scripting (with bodies, improvisations, machines, light, storyboards, notes, scribbles, and gestures) that can support production. In other words, alternative forms of scripting can provide different ways of thinking about production. (2009, p.129)
The significance of numerous screenplays and visual discourses that remediation generates has been almost entirely overlooked by adaptation studies. Screenwriting contemplates the notion that the creative process of adaptation of previous source texts can lead to fruitful research on canonicity, intertextuality, authorship, and the function of the screenwriter as the tuner of myriad previous works. This research deals with theorising the screenplay and the approach of the director in adapting the screenwriting.
The Screenwriter and Director seek to take a text written within a temporal period rather logically structured when they adapt a novel into a film. It exists as an entity in a spatial environment, but not as a story. They then convert it into a text that is still in time but is organised parallel to spatial principles. Famous film theorist Jean Mitry addressed this similar topic in his essay that time is formed from texts in the novel and from actions in the movie, and also that the novel is a story which distributes itself in a universe whereas the cinema is the universe in which the story unfolds itself. (1971, p.8)
The filmmaker can shift the narrative focus arbitrarily so the viewpoint in the film is less static than it is in the book. To perceive what the audience would see if physically present in the scene, the camera behaves in a precise way, much like a vision. Therefore, the screenwriter’s attempts to create the appearance of impartiality are actually making an effort to simulate the camera’s perspective. The director’s cinema focuses the camera on intriguing elements while avoiding the superfluous. By juxtaposing the novel and the film, the director’s cinematic style of changing views bears a remarkable resemblance to how multiple different perspectives are handled in literature, analogous to the location change from taxi to park. In that scene, Ron Howard adds a distinctive tone and style to the material as well as a clear air of mystery. As the essence of translation and adaptation are relevantly related, the director of an adaptation, like a translator, must also preserve part of the truth of the original narrative. (Ron Howard’s Refining a Script)
The context of film technique depends on the director’s central vision and creativity rather than assuming that a diverse audience attained the film’s visuospatial intertextuality in contemporary culture. The auteur theory asserts that the filmmaker is the film’s creator and the film’s core ideas and innovations come from the filmmaker. The challenge of the filmmaker in adapting The Da Vinci Code tends to be more extreme as the novel had set a remarkable expectation. Since numerous publications on novel-film adaptations have confused the auteurist and artistic style in Hollywood movies, etc., it feels pertinent to examine how academics benefit from a deliberate analysis of the auteurism in the film and the novel.
According to Bluestone, a competent screenwriter will be conscious of the limitations of the film and ensure alteration to a number of intriguing and occasionally conflicting segments. He also emphasised adaptation as a type of source that reimagines the core of the situation, actors, major plots, and thematically significant moments, and the director as the author instead of merely an adapter.
The auteur theory incentivises viewers to perceive movies in ways that no one did before they were created. Auteur theory indeed enables viewers to perceive adaptation better than they did previously by conceptualising the theory’s impact. In accordance with John Caughie’s Theories of Authorship,
The attention to mise-en-scène, even to the extent of a specific historically necessary formalism, is probably the most crucial positive contribution of auteurism to the development of specific and detailed film criticism, engaging with the specific mechanisms of visual discourse, freeing it from literary models, and from the liberal commitments which were prepared to validate films based on their themes alone. (1981, p. 128)
Buscombe makes an effort to convey an auteurist sense by claiming that the authenticity of the movie is indeed largely under the director’s hands, resulting from the fusion of narrative standards and a creative directorial approach. He also gives an example of the interplay between the creator and the creation, as opposed to the connection between the audience and the content. In director focus, the need to comprehend the intellectual and technical procedures involved in making a film is commonly expressed in order to understand the decisions chosen. This implies that since the director is considered to be the creator, he can control how the viewers may understand or perceive the movie (1981, p.27).
The director of Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code film adaptation has been accused by well-intended but inadequately competent specialists who failed to recognise that the constraints of intermedia transposition render it nearly impractical to maintain the entire narrative’s storylines. A deeper comprehension of the film’s meanings and repercussions can be better grasped from the auteurist approach. However, the influence of adaptation will be increased if the sociological and economical aspects are addressed. Despite the fact that the book is a controversial one, crafted with considerable style and finesse, it has a captivating plot. Dan Brown’s formula–foreign setting, exciting disclosures, frantic pursuit sequence, repeat as necessary–is fortunately taken by Ron Howard, a fantastic filmmaker, and transformed into amazing visual entertainment. Since then Ron Howard has become well-known for creating critically acclaimed and successful lucrative films that are consistent in their style and themes throughout genres and film industries. The inclusion of the auteur cinema in the narrative film structure is one of his successful cognitive strategies for empowering narrative control. (Ron Howard’s 7 Tips for Aspiring Filmmakers, 2021)
In addition to highlighting a significant difference between adaptation studies and screenplay studies, the marginalisation of integral adaptation processes and the transitory nature of adaptation screenwriting, both artistically and commercially, provide complementary directions for future study. In order to properly analyse the intricate industrial and creative processes that occur during adaptation, there is eventually a need to be focused on the link between the literary source text and produced film text (Sherry, 2014, p.87). It is possible to think of this restriction as turning the director’s cinema into a scene-setting space. The author’s objectives converge with those of the screenwriter, boosting the director’s cinema, which in this case transforms the plot location in the film. As a consequence, the script’s flow should be modified to match the context. The framework structure for alluding to Sophie’s lineage was developed by Howard: After fleeing from the authorities, Sophie and Langdon hideaway in the park from the car to discuss the possessed ‘key,’ while in the novel, they continue their escape in the car, bypassing the subsequent backstory sequence of the film. The park scene in the film opens with Sophie buying drugs from a homeless addict and trashing it (The Da Vinci Code, 00:40:36). Howard alludes to Sophie’s divinity by depicting the incident of buying drugs from the addict. This sequence appears to be a regular background extra in the plot’s flow, but at the climax, Howard connects the dots through Langdon, inferring the junkie scenario as an example of Sophie’s divinity mending the junkie (like the touch of Jesus) (The Da Vinci Code, 02:39:57). The author imparts suspense using narrative methods in the novel to preserve the reader’s hype, while in the film, the hype must be given earlier to make the viewers build suspense. A similar approach was used in the scene in which Langdon ruins the cryptex and later gives the papyrus to Sophie in the climax (on-the-spot in the novel) to keep the viewers on the edge of their seats. This fabrication of fiction to preserve the suspense emphasises the auteur’s impact on directorial cinema.
The auteur influence of Howard in the director’s cinema transcended most of the narrative elements created from the textual codes in the novel. According to him, he wanted to convey the adrenaline of going through the book, usually spanning for a week, along with the emotional drama accompanying technological discoveries. Howard largely overcame the difficulty of misemploying historical exposition by accentuating them and limiting the controversial scenes with action sequences. To prevent the movie from becoming a brainiac’s conceptual monologue, the majority of the section displayed the message of what transpired. The screenplay had to cut considerable amounts of the story in order to fit it into a two-and-a-half-hour film, but nothing crucial was altered. For example, the novel involves two cryptic’s where Langdon and Sophie unlock the first with the word ‘SOFIA’ and the second with ‘APPLE’. The movie cut short the narration, using just a single cryptex of the code ‘APPLE’ in order to account for the time-bounded structure of the film. In relation to the past of Sophie, the book describes that her parents died in a crash, during a car drive without Sophie. Her brother alone survived this crash and at the climax, Sophie subsequently meets him again at the Rosslyn Chapel. Howard added drama to the film by having Sophie survive the collision while travelling with her family in the car but the rest of the family perished.
The director’s composition enhances the cinematic language, maintaining a consistent theme, which Howard has created in distinctive artistic patterns. He also uses a humanistic approach to narrative and communicates science in the most clear-cut and instructive manner imaginable. Howard seems to concentrate on the Opus Dei ceremonies in order to make the audience gasp, instead of focusing on Sophie’s life and her perceptive comments on her dysfunctional relationship with her grandfather. The hostile experience of Sophie with Jacques Saunière was greatly skipped in order to prevent the audience from questioning Sophie’s help in solving the murder of her ‘hatred’ grandfather. Howard’s strategies are clear in the movie, which includes a complex or looped storyline, focusing on the leads in order to put the viewers in the shoes of the leads. Sophie’s development as an intelligent woman caught up in a network of cryptographic intrigue in her childhood is mostly skipped over, to portray her as one of the enthusiastic students of Langdon. Howard reinforced the aspects that give him influence over the writings, which are reflected in his filmography and the prospective perceptions of the film.
Ron Howard placed a special expectation on the movie by focusing on the actors, plot twist and a distinctive narrative development. The auteur’s influence on cinematography integrates a number of films, themes, or perspectives and uses the individuality of the director as a source of inspiration for the movie. For this, Howard has carved out a position by rehashing genre clichés: keeping the antagonist connected. In the novel, Aringarosa’s communication with Silas is interrupted after he is handed over to the ‘Teacher’ for the mission. In the film, Howard kept Silas in touch with Aringarosa, which aids in creating a Hollywood-style climax of assassinating all rivals through their connection. The interpretation of this signature has an impact on Howard’s work in filmmaking as a director and visual manipulator, showing his influence over the structure of the adaptation through narrative control.
The auteuristic persona of Ron Howard in the contemporary film adaptation industry is the key he uses in unifying the drive that permeates each film, bringing together a seemingly disparate collection of films and novels into a clear filmography. According to Howard, The Da Vinci Code is the kind of literature that inspires reflection, discussion, and controversy. In accordance with Ronald Perrier’s saying, “The Study of literature casts light on the meanings in the film, and the study of the film can illuminate the full value of the literature” (1992), the elements of both the novel and the film are impeccably salient for an adaptation study. Reviewing the strategies used in incorporating the auteurism of Howard in the movie, emphasising how the director permeated most of the aspects into the director’s cinema, especially in the light of the adapted screenplay.
Changes are inevitable when switching from verbal to visual medium as the passages are upgraded from literary texts to images. The studies on adaptation attribute all creative adaptations towards their classic resources and the movie, each as a literary and artistic medium.
Preliminary explorations focused on a single aspect of the adaptation techniques, not primarily the director, but this article emphasised the crucial elements that contribute to auteurial interpretation of the adapted screenplay, on every layer of director’s cinema. The structure of the storyline that the auteur approach produces gives the director the ability to organise their understanding of the material and to retrieve it more coherently. The screenwriter’s intertextual attribute to shape the film’s layout invokes the auteur imprint on the directorial cinema. The convergence of the screenwriter’s adapted screenplay with Howard’s auteurism in the Directorial Cinema advances the understanding of the film adaptation process.
This article claims that there is substantial theoretical potential for the fields of adaptation studies and screenplay studies to interact positively as they are intrigued by how texts can be adapted, how works can travel across diverse variations, and the impacts and artistic decisions taken by creators. This study asserts that the auteur theory is integral to adaptation studies when considering director-screenplay texts in order to validate auteurism in the framework of adaptation studies. This research focused on screenwriting as an integral part of the film adaptation, which might mitigate some of the unfavourable auteurist criticisms levelled at the director. In other words, the auteurists’ overwhelming emphasis on the director becomes more plausible when the screenwriter’s screenplay derived from the literary text undergoing adaptation is presumed. In reality, the ability to write a screenplay is more crucial and challenging as it encompasses a director’s inherent creative and filmic sensibilities. Therefore, when the director-screenplay relationship is included in the argument, the auteurist concept becomes more convincing that the film director is the ultimate author of the film
Given this theoretical concept, this study determines the significance of contextualising the auteur theory’s relation to the director’s cinema in adaptation studies. It has been asserted that the director is equally significant as a novelist, and the only distinction is that the author uses a pen and a camera adapter. As a corollary, the research is focused on the critically acclaimed novel The Da Vinci Code and its adaptation in an attempt to urge passionate, future researchers of adaptation studies to explore the influence of auteurism and screenwriting in director’s cinema.
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