If it's a good work of adaptation, the book should remain a book and the film should remain a film, and you should not necessarily read the book to see the film. If you do need that, then that means that it's a failure. That is what I think.
Interpretation
A successful adaptation keeps the essence of both the book and the film distinct.
In this quote, Marjane Satrapi suggests that a good adaptation of a literary work into film should respect the integrity of both forms. The film should stand on its own merits, allowing audiences to enjoy it without prior knowledge of the book; if viewers must read the book to appreciate the film, then the adaptation has failed in its purpose.
In practice
During a discussion on literary adaptations in a film studies class.
It is dangerous when you start calling people from one part of the world terrorists or fanatic, and you reduce them to some abstract notion. If evil has a geographical place, and if the evil has a name, that is the beginning of fascism. Real life is not this way. You have fanatics and narrow-minded people everywhere.
I'm not a politician. I don't know how to solve the problems of the world. But as an artist, I have one duty: to ask questions.
I'm not a politician because I'm an artist. Politicians have a very easy answer for a very complicated question. I have a very complicated question for what you consider very easy situations.
For me, drawing is a question of death and life. Every day I draw, I write, I do something.
My mother always told me I had to do 100 times better than a man. I had to work hard at maths, and learn four languages.
The best thing I ever did in my life was to ask, 'Do I like everybody?' And the answer was, 'No.' So why should everybody like me? If people are against me, so what? I'm against them too.
We could in the United States make as great a variety of wines as are made in Europe, not exactly of the same kinds, but doubtless as good.
This award is meaningful because it comes from my fellow dealers in celluloid.
So here I stand before you preaching organic architecture: declaring organic architecture to be the modern ideal and the teaching so much needed if we are to see the whole of life, and to now serve the whole of life, holding no traditions essential to the great TRADITION. Nor cherishing any preconceived form fixing upon us either past, present or future, but-instead-exalting the simple laws of common sense-or of super-sense if you prefer-determining form by way of the nature of materials.
Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time.
It was my father's hope, and it is ours, that the National Gallery would become not a static but a living institution, growing in usefulness and importance to artists, scholars and the general public.
Style is not something applied. It is something that permeates. It is of the nature of that in which it is found, whether the poem, the manner of a god, the bearing of a man. It is not a dress.
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