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.
The sketch hunter moves through life as he finds it, not passing negligently the things he loves, but stopping to know them, and to note them down in the shorthand of his sketchbook.
When you make music, you're forming these invisible vibrations in the air into different shapes and consistencies and speeds in order to create music, and understanding how the math of that works just gives you more colors to paint with, and allows you to get to what you want quicker.
I'm chasing a kind of language that can be unburdened by people's expectations. I think music is the primary model-how close can you get this language to be like music and communicate feeling at the base level in the same way a composition with no words communicates meaning? It might be impossible. Language is always burdened by thought. I'm just trying to get it so it can be like feeling.
Ideas alone can be works of art; they are in a chain of development that may eventually find some form. All ideas need not be made physical.
I often use the same harmonies as pop music because the complexity of what I do is elsewhere.
I collected pictures and I drew pictures and I looked at the pictures by myself. And because no one else ever saw them, the pictures were perfect and true. They were alive.
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