Shutter Island on Arte: how Martin Scorsese adapted Dennis Lehane’s novel

“His work is quite extraordinary, with a very interesting particularity: his words have an evocative power that goes beyond what is written on the page.”

Shutter Island is broadcast this Sunday evening on Arte. At the beginning of 2010, Martin Scorsese agreed to decipher his work adapting Dennis Lehane’s novel, which serves as the basis for the film, in First. Without spoiling the plot, he delivered the major imprints of the book, but also his own inventions, essential for intelligently transposing the story to the screen. Selected pieces.

Lehane’s talent? Knowing how to play with the reader’s imagination
The filmmaker, for example, delivered a juicy anecdote: when casting one of the female characters, he was convinced that the young woman was described as thin in the novel. After checking, Scorsese realized that his physique was never specified by Lehane, but that, through an association of ideas, his photo reminded one of the characters of the concentration camps. Hence certainly the idea of ​​thinness, anchored in his mind, but which is never really explained!

“His writing is cinematic, in that, as in a film, he cuts through space and time. But he does it in the text. His work is quite extraordinary, with a very interesting particularity: his words have an evocative power that goes beyond what is written on the page. (he then takes as an example the photos of a character who disappears at the start of the plot, Rachel, played by Emily Mortimer. When I reread the book to check how Lehane described these photos, I realized that he didn’t say anything about them! (Laughing.) I was convinced he had done it. I can swear he burned a vision into my mind that seemed to detail the scene in its entirety. In other words, I had deduced that Rachel’s photo must depict her emaciated. However, the text does not specify this in any way! The book is full of examples like this.”