Differing Versions

The director can also come up with a completely different twist to the tale. The famous director Alfred Hitchcock was known for this, a popular example being the movie Rebecca made on the novel by Daphne du Maurier. In the novel, the hero Maximilian de Winter actually commits a murder, while this is not so in the film. This detail has a major role to play in the story. There are plenty of other examples like this from the field of adaptation.

Another popular form of adaptation is what is called the spoof or parody of a popular text. Saratchandra    Chatterjee’s Devdas has been made into a film in most of the Indian languages, but the recent Hindi movie DevD was a spoof on the novel/film. DevD was not a tragedy and the hero was not the typical jilted lover that Saratchandra’s hero was. The film was Anurag Kashyap’s interpretation of the character of the traditional Devdas, and he becomes a narcissistic,chauvinist hero in the modern version. Perhaps the most subversive was the portrait of Chandramukhi who is the prostitute with the golden heart in Saratchandra. In DevD, she is Chanda, a schoolgirl who is forced into the business because of a sex racket and eventually Dev finds his partner in her. While the original is a tearful tragedy, the Anurag Kashyap version ends on a positive note with Dev deciding to spend the rest of his life with Chanda.