Art & Creativity Quote by Neil Jordan

Neil Jordan’s jab lands because it sounds like common sense and heresy at the same time. It punctures the prestige economy that treats “based on the beloved novel” as an automatic upgrade, as if cinema’s job were to borrow literary authority and cash it in at the box office. He’s not really arguing that adaptations shouldn’t exist; he’s daring filmmakers to justify themselves. If the goal is fidelity, you’ve already lost. The book will always be more complete, more interior, more patient than a two-hour, actor-dependent machine.

The subtext is an artist’s defense of medium specificity. Jordan, a director who’s adapted plenty (and knows the compromises up close), is warning against adaptation as reverence. Reverence produces museum cinema: dutiful, tasteful, and dead. His line is less anti-book than anti-safety. Great books come with built-in audiences, reviews pre-written in the language of comparison, and a protective aura that can excuse bland choices. “What’s the point?” is a challenge to that aura.

Context matters: adaptation culture thrives on risk management. Studios love proven IP; awards bodies love literature’s glow; audiences love the comfort of recognition. Jordan’s provocation insists the only legitimate reason to adapt is transformation: to do something the book can’t do, or to argue with it, compress it, reframe it, betray it intelligently. If the film isn’t a new work with its own reasons for existing, then it’s not an adaptation so much as a promotional souvenir.