Screenwriter David Benioff says the greatest challenge of adapting Khaled Hosseini’s bestselling book The Kite Runner was compacting the story down into a two hour screenplay. Hosseini’s 370 page novel follows two young Afghanistan boys - Amir and Hassan – whose friendship is ripped apart when Amir betrays his best friend by failing to come to his aid. Decades later, Amir is offered a chance at redemption and the opportunity to finally set things right.
Benioff’s adaptation went through quite a few versions before a final draft was settled upon. “The first draft I wrote was, I think, like 165 pages or something which probably would have been about a three hour movie,” explained Benioff. “ I was trying to figure out how to tell the story and be true to the essentials of the story, but also having to cut out 80% of it. That was tricky. The draft that ultimately shot was the 13th draft. The shooting script was draft number 13. There were a lot of trims and trying one thing, not quite working. Modifying it and cutting…so forth and so on.”
When Benioff first got the job of adapting The Kite Runner, the book was still in hardcover and hadn’t yet hit the bestseller list. “It hadn’t become this phenomenon that it is now,” said Benioff. “There wasn’t nearly as much pressure. There became more and more pressure. I think it was a few months into the job I got an email from Khaled Hosseini saying the book was going to be on the New York Times bestseller list. It’s incredible news, but we never thought… We thought a couple of weeks on the bestseller list and then it would slide off. And then it kept creeping up the list. It eventually got to number 1 and it never left. I think it’s been on now for 4 years or something.”
The popularity of the novel really hit Benioff while he was on a flight to New York. “There was an elderly lady sitting next to me and she asked me what I did. I told her I’m a screenwriter. She said, ‘Anything I’ve heard of?’ I said, ‘I’m working on this book called The Kite Runner.’ She grabbed my arm and she said, ‘The Kite Runner is my favorite novel. Don’t change a word!’ That’s when I knew this was going to be tricky.”
The process of narrowing down what had to be left in with what sections and storylines from the novel wouldn’t make it into the film was a difficult one for Benioff. “I think ultimately you have to try not to listen to the noise and just trust yourself on it, because it’s possible to be too democratic in the process and listen to all the other voices saying this is what you should have in there,” explained Benioff. “I think it’s just reading the book and rereading it so many times, and trying to figure out what’s the skeleton. There are certain things you can strip away, but these bones are necessary. That’s a really weird analogy. I’m not sure about the skeleton.”
For Benioff, deciding what could be left out of The Kite Runner hinged on how the part in question connected to the central story of two boys growing up in Kabul. Explaining his take on Hosseini's story, Benioff said, “They’re best friends but at the same time, it’s an unequal relationship because one is the child of a wealthy man and one is the child of a servant, and so they have a complicated relationship. And then of course, the pivotal scene where Amir betrays his best friend through an act of omission, and then the repercussions of that. And then coming to America and his life there. But then being given a chance to go back and redeem himself and potentially try to make things not better, because obviously it’s too late for Hassan, but at least to help his son. That was at the core of it for me.
The things that got cut, which I think are really beautiful sections of the novel, are the moments that don’t deal with that central story as much. For example, there’s a lot of space in the novel about Amir and Soraya and the fertility issue. She’s unable to conceive and there’s space spent on that. That’s pretty much completely gone from the movie. There’s one line where Rahim Kahn asks him if they have kids and he says, essentially, no. Or there’s a very long section near the end of the book where after Amir has rescued Sohrab, they’re in Pakistan dealing with visas to try and get back. There’s a character, the INS immigration official, there’s a long section of dealing with their attempt to get a visa. That wasn’t part of the central story so all that stuff was taken away.”
“At a certain point you just have to recognize that the book is the book and I’m not changing anything from the book,” said Benioff. “The book is there and all the words that Khaled wrote down are going to stay there. The movie’s got to work on its own and that means making many cuts.”
There was one scene Benioff absolutely hated to see go. “For me, the most painful cut was I love the hairlip sequence where Hassan is born with a hairlip, and there’s a moment where Boba hires a plastic surgeon from India to come for Hassan’s birthday and repair the hairlip. I thought it was a beautiful sequence in the book. It was in the first draft of the script and, ultimately, it was just too long. It was like a six or a seven page sequence. There wasn’t time for it, and it wasn’t really part of the central narrative. As wonderful as it was and as illuminating as it was about the relationships between the three of them, that went by the wayside.“
Benioff’s tackled a hugely popular bestseller with The Kite Runner as well Homer’s The Iliad ( Troy). Next up is the X-Men spinoff, Wolverine, starring Hugh Jackman and directed by Gavin Hood. The passion of Kite Runner fans is equalled if not surpassed by Wolverine fans, something which Benioff is well aware of. “I grew up a big Wolverine fan. I’ve been reading comic books since I was a little kid and Wolverine was always my favorite comic book hero. I consider myself just as much of a fan as anyone else. I’m hopeful that that movie will make the fans happy.”
