Albert Serra and Bi Gan Debate Literary Adaptation and Why AI Will Never Have Innocence

Spanish filmmaker Albert Serra and Chinese auteur Bi Gan debated literary adaptation at the Shanghai International Film & TV Market, with Serra arguing that adaptations are for lazy people and that mediocre source material often yields better films, while Bi defended adaptation as a crucial thread in cinema history. Both directors agreed that freedom from reverence for the source material is key to creating original work.

Spanish filmmaker Albert Serra https://variety.com/t/albert-serra/ and Chinese auteur Bi Gan https://variety.com/t/bi-gan/ had only just met for the first time last month in Paris, but at the Shanghai International Film & TV Market the two directors sat down together as if they’d been arguing about literature for years. The panel, “Stories Travel Further: Literature & Cinema in Spain-China Dialogue,” opened with short films by Carla Simón, Turbo and Nicolas Mendez and a presentation on Spanish literature’s cinematic potential from the Federation of Publishers’ Guilds of Spain. Serra, whose films draw on classic texts without treating them as blueprints, said the source material barely registers by the time he starts working. Popular on Variety “I just used some means or some very basic ideas that everybody knows, and from that point of departure to create something on my own,” he said. “So in fact, to write a script with literature’s principle and to write a script based on a new idea, it’s not very different. The development of what you will do in the film, it’s totally new and creative.” “I don’t care. I just want to do a good film, an original and personal film,” Serra added. “I think more about my own style and how to develop it.” Bi took a gentler line on the subject, describing his relationship to literature as structural rather than reverential. “A film’s title is its face. I often use book titles from literature as film titles, giving the audience a perfect gateway into the story. Apart from that, my films incorporate many literary and even poetic structures, and that can set it apart from typical genre films, because its narrative threads, storytelling approach, and character development all adapt a poetic structure,” he said. The two directors expressed admiration for each other’s work. Serra praised the use of poetry in Bi’s “Resurrection,” saying it could inspire people to think about images and use language differently. Bi said that watching Serra’s “Afternoons of Solitude” had given him a literature-like experience, because the narrative logic of the film was totally unexpected. “His film structured literature in cinematic language, which is completely new and fresh to me,” said Bi. “I saw scenes of clouds, some of them could be a bit long, but actually it doesn’t feel dull.” “Why did you want to adapt material that’s not your own?” Serra said. “You have to be respectful to the material somehow, because if not, you will create your own story. You will not adapt a story of somebody else just to destroy it, that would be like a narcissistic exercise that is stupid. But at the same time, you have to betray the original material in order to create your own story. You have to be brave.” Serra went further: “I don’t see the point of doing the adaptation. So it’s for lazy people because they don’t want to figure out an original idea.” “Literary adaptation has always been a crucial thread in the historical development of cinema,” said Bi. “Some films, like Serra’s ‘Honor of the Knights,’ manage to completely deconstruct the original text, which is an approach that I find very appealing. However, there were also many classic adaptations, including those with novelists joining in the project. During the Film Noir movement in Hollywood, literature became a major aesthetic event and symbol, ultimately pushing the boundaries of cinematic language.” Both filmmakers also converged on a counterintuitive point: that mediocre source material often produces better films than great books do. “People with good books, they are too respectful to the book, so they are not free,” said Serra. “They feel inside a prison. The book is everything, so they want good things in all levels, artistic direction, photography, and script. But then, they don’t match, they don’t glue. With bad books, people is not so respectful, so they do whatever they want. It is not like making an adaptation, because they feel more free.” Bi put the challenge plainly: “Adapting text to screen is a formidable task riddled with obstacles, making truly successful literary films exceedingly rare.” “Try to forget,” said Serra. “Because if you don’t forget the other output, you have to create your own universe.” Among the literary figures who had shaped him, Bi named Federico García Lorca, whose poetry he described as “brief and beautiful, as a small, soft outcry.” The influence, he said, was not always legible on the page of a script – but ran deeper, into questions of mortality and fear that had fundamentally shaped his sensibility. Both directors pushed back on the notion that AI could open up filmmaking to everyone. Bi questioned the premise of human-AI communication itself. “Language is a huge fantasy itself. We thought that AI can make something based on whatever we put into it, but the miscommunication itself is unsolvable. Telling an AI to complete what you want it to complete has a natural contradiction within.” “The only thing AI will never have is innocence, because AI is based on collecting data, and innocence is based upon deleting data,” said Serra. “Real artistic filmmakers are unpredictable because they destroy what everybody has done before to create something new. If you think about a new form with nothing in common with previous forms, you will always be ahead of AI.” The Shanghai International Film & TV Market runs contiguously with the Shanghai International Film Festival https://variety.com/t/shanghai-international-film-festival/ .