Unfilmable" stories like Life of Pi can make perfect cinema Two Booker Prize-winning novels regularly described as "unfilmable" - Yann Martel's Life of Pi, and Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children - reach our screens this Christmas. One is a slightly surprising triumph, the other a cloth-eared disaster. Between them, they illustrate the uncertainty of transition from literary sources to the cinema - namely, that plenty of books feel unfilmable, until someone decides to have a stab, and there's no cast-iron rule for the best way to do it. As these two examples do prove, vaunted "fidelity" to one's chosen text is neither a guarantee of quality nor an automatic obstacle to producing stand-alone art. Both films could be called faithful, albeit condensed treatments of these hugely popular books, but where Ang Lee's Life of Pi finds an alluring and imaginative cinematic language - in 3D - for relating the wondrous adventures Pi tells, Midnight's Children is stuck being a bookish adaptation of a book by its own author, and an arduously long one, which Rushdie was misguidedly invited to narrate. After two hours of switched babies and their chiastic fortunes, his fruity insistence that "certain ironies must not pass unnoticed" only reinforces the feeling that Deepa Mehta's film has hoisted a kind of authorised Cliff's Notes treatment up on screen. There are as many other proven approaches to making good films from good books, or even good films from bad ones, as there are examples of either. It is often said that genuine pinnacles of novelistic art - Anna Karenina, say - may be harder to lift off the page than the average airport read, but that hasn't stopped directors from trying. Joe Wright's recent attempt at that very whopper used the money-saving gimmick of staging it all as a proscenium-arch live performance, but it was a conception that impressed more for its chutzpah than its actual purchase on the book's themes, and there's almost no conceivable interpretation of Tolstoy that could wholly succeed with a Vronsky as miscast as Aaron Taylor-Johnson was. It's not surprising that directors, including Ang Lee himself with Brokeback Mountain, have often turned to shorter literary forms, which can be chewed whole rather than split up into chunks. Just as often, they've chosen to use books as a mere springboard for their own preferred vision. A classic instance of doing both at once is Francis Coppola's Apocalypse Now (1979), a loose but definitive adaptation of Conrad's Heart of Darkness, which comes closer to nailing the essence of the book than almost any of the attempts to do Conrad on film "authentically" and in period. We could make an honourable exception for Hitchcock's excellent Sabotage (1936), based on The Secret Agent, but not for The Secret Agent (1996). Similarly, Henry James's novella The Turn of the Screw has proved hugely adaptable into all kinds of media - Britten's opera and Jack Clayton's unforgettable 1961 film The Innocents top the pack - where most of its author's major works, with their dense prose and knitting of multiple motives, have not. Jane Campion's gorgeous The Portrait of a Lady (1996), which starts halfway through the novel, is a neglected gem, but barely anyone saw it, and Iain Softley's tersely moving The Wings of the Dove (1997) is very often terrific, but you have to go back to William Wyler's Washington Square-derived The Heiress (1949) to find another one that works at all. The king of adapting the "unfilmable" is David Cronenberg, whose versions of William Burroughs's Naked Lunch (1991) and J G Ballard's Crash (1996) succeed by Cronenbergising both texts: their ideas mutate with his aesthetic, like Jeff Goldblum and that fly. This year's Cosmopolis was unmistakably Cronenbergy in its style choices, but Don DeLillo's source novel is a more dubious candidate for fruitful synergy, and in lifting huge chunks of its dialogue from the page, Cronenberg perpetrates one of his most verbose and unsatisfying pictures. Contrast Spider (2002), a rare instance of a novelist (Patrick McGrath) succeeding with his own script, if only because Cronenberg insisted that the entire voiceover be stripped off, leaving the slippery inner life of Ralph Fiennes's disturbed main character to be explored wholly by the camera. I've heard the case made that Amy Heckerling's Clueless (1995), which borrows its plot from Emma, is a better Austen adaptation than any of the films named after her books. Again, die-hard Ang Lee fans may beg to differ - his 1995 Sense and Sensibility is glorious. For tone, I might prefer the BBC's Persuasion, directed by Roger Michell, which in Amanda Root and Ciarán Hinds was graced with casting Austen herself might have liked. As for the casting of Clueless - Alicia Silverstone? No one's idea of Emma, but the ideal Cher - her character's name - in a sly contemporary spin. "How did they ever make a movie of Lolita?" asked publicity posters before the release of Stanley Kubrick's 1962 attempt, which did so by toning down the intentional sleaze of Nabokov's creation. The countryside around St Albans is a sanitised stand-in for the neon contours and motels of roadside America, and lead actress Sue Lyon was 16 when it premiered, not 12. Given that Adrian Lyne's equally controversial 1997 adaptation might be considered his single best movie, Lolita is an interesting case of an "unfilmable" book that's actually been filmed twice, and well. What either director might have done with Nabokov's Pale Fire, written in the form of a book-length commentary by a crazy person on a 999-line poem, is harder to guess. Still, as smartphones, multimedia installations, and live digital broadcasting in cinemas make anything thinkable, "How did they ever make a movie of Pale Fire?" is a poser that may just begin to tantalise us.