u/ibid-11962

My previous post about the Eragon show covered the development timeline and current status.

This post (and the one that follows it), will showcase Christopher's comments about adaptations. He's said a lot on this topic, and so I've loosely divided his comments into two posts.

This post will focus on the artisitc vision of adaptation, everything that happens before the product is finalized, focusing on the creative aspects and direction of the show.

Of course, keep in mind that while Christopher is both a producer and writer, his input on the show is one of many creative voices, and that many decisions, especially higher-level decisions, will be made by other people. These posts exist merely to document what Christopher has said, not to inform what will happen in the show.

As usual, more quotes can be found in the pinned thread under the stickied comment.

Adapting Eragon as a Movie

> In my mind, especially the first book, was always this epic film. ... As the author, I always think of the story as this one big sweeping experience. I would love that to come across in the film. That's what you get with The Lord of the Rings. That's what you get with Lawrence of Arabia. It's this single experience that you get as you sit down and watch it. (3b)

> I look at a lot of the really long, epic Bollywood films, and to me, that's sort of the goal for Eragon. (1)

> [It is challenging to] get the sweep of the story to work over multiple episodes. When you do it in the shape of a movie it's all one unit. The audience consumes it in one sitting. Which you can do with a television show, but it is rarer. The fact that you have episode breaks breaks up the story essentially. It changes the pacing. That's part of the reason why I was initially reluctant to even consider a television adaptation, because as a viewer I like that experience of being swept away on a story from start to finish. (4f)

> If it were a film then that's going to impose certain restrictions on length. So you might have to dump Teirm for example and go straight to Dras Leona in terms of timing for the film. I've thought about how to make that work. Jeod is not essential for the first film, although I'd prefer to have him in that film. The dialogue will be probably a little different. The pacing will be a little different. The explanation of the magic will be a little streamlined. Things like that. (3f)

Adapting Eragon as a Television Show

> But a television show would do so much for the worldbuilding and the characters, especially with the later books, because there just is not space, even in a three and a half hour film. Return of the King is shorter than Eragon in terms of wordcount. Both Brisingr and Inheritance are significantly longer than Dune. All of that to say, a good television show might actually be the best adaptation these days. (3c)

> A television adaptation I would expect to hit all of the major beats and all the major scenes from Eragon. I think you would see larger changes with the books down the series because they get bigger so you would have to make more decisions of what to include and what not to include. (3g)

> Television shows are more character based than film, simply because they have more time to deal with the characters. Film in many ways is much more like a short story than a television show is. If you're doing long-form television like Game of Thrones where it is this larger story that's being told over multiple episodes, then you have a lot more time with the characters than you do in a film. You get to know them better. And that is a challenge, of course. You have to know the characters well enough that you can write them. You have to have their storylines planned out well enough. But if you can pull it off you get an experience that you don't get in film. (4e)

Adapting Eragon as Animation vs as Live Action

> I love animation, I'm a huge fan of Miyazaki and Studio Ghibli and a bunch of other animated films, and I agree that an animated version of Eragon could be wonderful and awesome, but this particular adaptation is going to be live action. (7b)

> We the creators don't actually have a lot of say in the type of adaptation. If Disney or another studio has optioned or bought the rights to that property, it's really their choice as to how they're going to adapt it. In the case of Eragon, Disney wants a live action adaptation. Which to be fair, is also what I want, but I love animation. It could certainly be done beautifully in animation. I have no reservations there. But it's not my choice ultimately. Because they're the ones who have to cut the checks and spend the ridiculous amount of money to put dragons on screen. So if they want to do that I'm happy. (18)

> A lot will depend on the budget the show gets and exactly what's in the script. But I do think it is possible to do live action, and we're going to do our best to make it as good as possible. (7a)

> It's really expensive to do live action because the catering bill for feeding the Dragons on set is just sky high. You don't even want to know how many cows and sheep they have to shovel into the dragons. But it's going to be live action. (10)

No Adaptation is Perfect

> The advertising you get [for an adaptation] far outstrips the advertising you can get for a book. Even if you have a movie adaptation that literally just grosses a couple hundred thousand dollars in the theaters, you are still going to sell at least a million copies based off the advertising for your book. Having a film adaptation is kinda the jackpot for that reason, and of course if it's a successful adaptation, and especially if you can get more than one film or a television series or something like that, the sales are going to be that much bigger. And if you're so fortunate as to be in that situation, you can leverage that into all sorts of other opportunities. Not something to turn down lightly. ... And you should accept that you probably won't be happy with the adaptation. (2)

> I have to temper expectations a little bit. A lot of this is gonna be out of my hands, even being deep in the process. The directors will make choices, the actors will make choices, Disney will make choices. (9)

> Even if I were 100% in charge of an adaptation and I had all the money in the world and all the time in the world and I could make it exactly the way I wanted to make it, there is no way to make it exactly the way it is in the book because you just can't. Then on top of that, the way I envision and see the characters and the world is probably different from how a lot of readers envision and see it, and that's something also that people don't always think about when they say "oh I wish the creator was in charge of the project". (14)

> [Do I have creative control?] Nope. And it's very rare we get that because, put it this way, if you were going to spend a hundred million dollars on something, you kind of want final say on what's going to happen. And that's the attitude that the studios currently take. And if I was spending a hundred million dollars on something or more, you're darn right I want final say on it. I'm also somewhat limited by the contracts that were originally negotiated back before the series became what it now is. (20)

Difficulties in Adaptation

> Film and television is an external media and literature is an internal media. With books you can get inside the characters' heads and you can tell the reader and show the reader how the characters feel and what they're thinking and how that affects their actions. Whereas in film and television, all you can do is show what they do. When you're adapting a book you might think, "All I have to do is write the scenes that show what happens: Eragon goes here, he does this, he says that. And if the scenes were well paced in the book, then they'll be well paced in television show or a film." Well, they won't be well paced. You'll probably have to shorten them or restructure them to work within a visual medium. But the big thing is that without the context of those internal thoughts, those actions end up feeling very flat or lacking context. One of the big challenges of an adaptation is to say, "This is what's going on inside the character's head. Now how the hell do I show it?" Sometimes it's through dialogue, where they're saying, "This is how I feel". The more elegant solution is to find actions for the characters. I'll pick a cliched example here. A character is feeling sad, so they cry. Or they walk morosely through their living room and slightly move the picture of their dead spouse on the mantelpiece. Whereas in a book, you just might be describing their emotions inside and all of that. Where you can expect to see the greatest changes in the adaptation is finding ways to show what's going on inside Eragon, Saphira, Murtagh, Arya, Roran, as well as any pacing considerations. (6b)

> You need to strive for depth in your characters and and you have to find visual ways to show what the characters are feeling, thinking, experiencing, hoping for. Badly written film or television dialogue tends to be very flat, very surface level. Well-written dialogue contains multiple levels of meaning. You know what the character is saying but you also know what they're not saying and what they're hoping for and what they're fearing and all of this. It's tricky to take all of Eragon's internal desires and battles and concerns and to externalize that or to work it into the dialogue. (4i)

> People are much less willing to endure having their time wasted when they're sitting and watching a television show or a film. You can tell very easily when the script and the filmmakers or television makers are just wasting your time and things aren't going places. If you read really good scripts, every line does something. They're wonders of construction, puzzles that just snap together and every piece means something and every line does something. Which is incredibly hard to do. It takes an enormous amount of thought and work to get to that point. But the flip side is things that take a long time in a book can be depicted in a couple of frames in a show. I'm describing the landscape, the Beor Mountains, Alagaësia, the Spine, whatever. You just have the camera show that and bam, you're done. It doesn't take very long. Other things, it goes the other direction. You might be able to write a conversation in a book that's fairly quick to read or summarized, but to actually show the characters talking about that topic might take longer. (6a)

> Fantasy, I think is the hardest genre in order to do successfully because if it's set in a fictitious world, you need to create the feeling in your audience that this is a different world. Accents need to be different. The costumes need to be appropriate. It needs to feel real, while also perhaps magical and mythical if you're going for a Tolkien-esque feel. (16b)

Capturing the Heart of the Story

> If we get a remake, I would really love to see the heart of the story brought to life. The reason I wrote these books is because of Eragon's relationship with Saphira, this grand adventure, this emotion that I felt for the story. That's ultimately what the first film didn't do for me. I'm okay with things being changed for an adaptation. That's the nature of the beast. You can't get around that when it comes to adaptations, but as long as you capture the soul of the story, those feelings of wonder, Eragon learning to use magic, Eragon growing and having this adventure, going out into the world and getting a sword and learning to fight and learning why all of it is important and what's right and what's wrong. That's what to me makes the story work in so many ways. (3a)

> As the author of the books, my job is to try to preserve what makes these stories work and what makes these characters work so that when you guys and our listeners and everyone else out there watches the show, you feel what you felt from the books and maybe more. Maybe it'll do some new things too that you enjoy. I think most reasonable people will acknowledge certain changes happen with adaptations. But when those changes violate the spirit of material or diverge from it so much that it's not giving you what you want from the story and not doing what the story is supposed to do, that's when the problems arise. (6c)

> Information is relatively easy to convey. You can write it in a flat clear manner, you've conveyed the information. But to use a subjective media like language or even visuals and music and create the emotion in the audience that you want to create is the height of artistic endeavor in a lot of ways. My hope is that whatever changes will occur with the creation of this adaptation is that the final product will still bring out those same feelings that people loved when they read the story and that I loved when I wrote the damn thing. And if that's the case, I'll feel like it was a successful adaptation. (25)

The Author is an Important Advisor

> When you write a story, you go through this entire chain of thought that allows you to build the plot and the world and the characters. You explore a lot of avenues that don't work. And as a result, you end up creating whatever it is you create, and you have a whole list of reasons for why you create what you did create. When someone comes in to adapt your work, they haven't gone through that whole chain of thought. They're starting from the outside working in instead of starting from the inside working out. And thus, it can be very easy for someone adapting a book to say, "Well, why don't we change XYZ? Why don't we just do this?" Because they haven't put in sometimes literally years of thought into why XYZ wouldn't work in this world or with these characters. (16a)

> That's why some of the best adaptations are when the original author is able to be part of that process [and] participate in a way that allows whoever is making the adaptation to understand what is essential to the property. (3d)

> Having more time away from the actual writing of the books, I've had years and years to think about the story, and as a result, I've thought of a number of ways to streamline, condense, actually adapt it. Those thoughts only come with time, no substitute for that. So having some distance from the writing has actually helped in terms of figuring out how to adapt it in a successful manner. (15)

Specific Changes

> [It] is pretty humbling to have really smart writers elbow deep into something that you've been working on for 20 years and they're asking you, "Okay, can we do this? Well, what if we do this? Well, we only have so many episodes, we're have to cut this, so that means this changes" and in some ways it's also a little bit of a relief because there are other smart people looking at this and figuring it out and it's not all on me. (26)

> I'm writing the exact scenes [I've been wanting to add with baby Saphira]. We'll see if they actually get filmed. (24)

> [More Brom screen time?] Probably. (12)

> The movie "Hero" did a wonderful job of showing a form of mental battle, I think. There are a number of ways to tackle the problem. (13)

> There's some opportunities to show stuff I didn't show in the books. Like the one thing I would have added in retrospect would be showing a little bit of the journey of the Varden from Tronjheim to Surda. It would provide some more to show Nasuada consolidating her power and dealing with the challenges of the other factions within the Varden as well as the dwarves and Surda and all of that. (4h)

Points of View

> If it's a TV show then you need to bring in more material. You might start following Roran's story back at Carvahall a lot sooner, like in the first season during the events of the first book rather than waiting until season two and book two to bring him. The villagers of Carvahall would have to be treated as proper characters, and have some small storylines as you need to have with side characters. There's enough material with Eragon's story and Roran's story that you can certainly fill out episodes without any problems. (4a)

> Roran is essentially grown up, he doesn't actually change that much in the Inheritance Cycle, his change occurs if you will, when his father dies, Garrow. Him and Katrina are already together. They've already decided, "this is the person for me", there's no courtship going on anymore, they're together. They love each other and they want to have a family and start their own life together. That's the endgame in some ways of growing up. Eragon's not there and Murtagh's not there either. (5b)

> There's a lot that could be done treating Eragon, Roran, and Murtagh essentially as as three facets of the story. The focus stays on Eragon, of course. He's the main story, but it's almost like we have three brothers who are each dealing with the question of how to grow up and how to deal with power and responsibility and life and death and the meaning of the universe in separate ways. And it all complements and reflects on Eragon's own decisions and journey. Because Eragon is the youngest of the three and is the one who is the most immature. Roran is essentially grown up. He has a partner, he has a place in the world, and he knows his path and then all of that gets disrupted of course, but he already knows who he is. The core of who he is doesn't change. Eragon is much more in flux because he's yet to be fully formed. And Murtagh's in between. He is more mature than Eragon but not as settled as Roran is in his personality. And of course he's put under enormous stress. This is a real world thing. Who we are and how we behave changes based off of our circumstances. Murtagh is put under enormous stress, and his circumstances change enormously. To go from albeit an incredibly stressful childhood and upbringing, but one that was very luxurious by all standards, to essentially hitchhiking and and hoofing it through the wilderness, to being treated as a traitor or at least a threat by the Varden and then captured by Galbatorix and then bonded with Thorn. In some ways his journey is the most transformative of all of them. (4c)

> Murtagh's point of view ... you [would] see him escaping and losing Tornac his mentor, having to hide out, deciding to hunt out these rumors of a new Rider, whatever is going on with the Ra'zac. ... Murtagh's story in my mind is incredibly interesting and we don't see a lot of it. Once he's captured by Galbatorix, his experience there where he's essentially broken in a lot ways while still being bonded to Thorn, while Thorn's growth is accelerated. That's a heck of a sequence, and I regret that I wasn't able to share that with readers, although that would have upped the age range of the books I think. What Murtagh goes through is the dark version of what Eragon goes through in Ellesméra with the Elves. Just as Eragon's getting trained with Oromis, Murtagh's being tortured and trained by Galbatorix. (5a)

> [In the 2011] screenplay for Eldest ... we show[ed] a lot more of Murtagh's point of view after he's captured by Galbatorix, and his experience with Thorn and Galbatorix and all of that and how that leads him to become the person he is when Eragon reunites with him on the Battle of the Burning Plains. (4b)

> There's always a trade-off. You lose the reveal, but at the same time, handled properly, you don't follow Murtagh right up to when he and Eragon reunite. You have a gap there. So what shape he's going to show up in and what shape Thorn's going to show up in and how fast Thorn grows can all be a bit of a surprise. Hopefully if done well you would actually get more tension because you know this confrontation is fast approaching and Eragon's not aware of it. (4d)

> There's a lot of material in Murtagh that would be useful to incorporate in a TV show. ... This is not why I wrote the book, but it was definitely in my head that getting my version of this down was not a bad idea. (8, 18)

> Were I to go back and write the story from scratch, there would be a temptation to give equal screen time, as it were, right from the very first book with Roran and Murtagh. Because in a lot of ways, this is the story of three brothers. They each have different experiences that reflect each other in a lot of ways, and it would be fun to see that break from the very beginning. I didn't have the skill to do it back then. But the downside of that, especially if you cram that into the first book, is it takes away from the clarity and structure of Eragon's story, which really is so strong in that first book. So it's a balancing act. It's the sort of thing that might work better in a television show. (11)

> Nasuada might actually be a POV character in some sort of television show. Bring her in later of course, but yeah she might be a POV character. Same possibly with Orik, because they both end up in positions of power and shape a lot of the events that happen. (4g)

How Christopher Writes

> If starting to work on an adaptation I'd have to reread the books. I have not read Eragon since 2003. (3e)

> Outlining is how I approach screenwriting and it's serving me very well at the moment. (17a)

> I'll do storyboards for a script. (20)

> I have been learning to become a screenwriter in a way that I haven't before. I've done scripts before, but I want to be a good screenwriter, especially when it comes to Eragon. So I've really been putting the work in. (20)

> Film and television perhaps feels a bit more free to hop around visually, which is something that could be confusing to a reader. It's something writers used to do a little bit more of when the omniscient point of view was more popular. I have a deluxe edition of Murtagh, and I wrote some additional scenes for it. The stuff I wrote actually uses some of the techniques that I've been using in the scripts I've been working with, so I'll be curious how people respond to that. If a character is looking at something then sometimes you do a little flashback, inspired by the thing that the character's looking at. (17b)

> I think the biggest thing I've learned [while screenwriting] is just a little more flexibility in terms of how to depict information, how to convey those visuals, and also trying to be a little more concise, because scripts are essentially outlines, all things considered. No one really cares about the quality of that prose a whole lot, so the descriptions are fairly bare bones. What needs to be as good as possible ultimately is the structure and then the dialogue, because the dialogue will be spoken by the actors. (17c)

> I've written a number of television episodes at this point and I've always hit my length, I'm not running long, which is good. (17d)

> So far I've had a HUGE amount of input on every part and stage of the show. We'll see if that continues, but it's the complete opposite of my earlier experience. (21)

> The process is going to be different for the later scripts. Right now just to get it off the ground I have been doing 90% of the writing and they've been happy to let me do that, though they're providing feedback and also diving into writing when appropriate. And then we just deal with the notes we get in order to get approval, first from the producers, that's the first layer, and then Disney execs specifically. (19)

> We've had lots of notes from execs and the studio, but so far, they've all been reasonable. I've had no real issue with any of them, and I think they've helped make the script(s) much stronger. It's certainly been quite a learning experience for me as well. (23)

> The amount of revision in Hollywood is INSANE. Totally eclipses what we go through in publishing (and I do a LOT of revision on my books). ... Funnily enough, it's gotten closer to the book over this process. Sometimes I just want to say, "I told you so..." (22a, 22b)

Additional quotes from Christopher can be found here.

"Allies: A Fractalverse Story" is live on Kickstarter

Disney+ Eragon - Christopher's Thoughts on Adaptation - Creative Decisions