10 Movies That Completely Reinvent The Books They’re Based On

Brainchild of Steve Coogan and Michael Winterbottom, this movie captures the soul of Lawrence Sterne’s eighteenth-century novel Tristram Shandy without reproducing anything from the book at all. It has a great cast: it features the comedic bickering of Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon many years before they collaborated with Winterbottom on The Trip, and it has a cameo by Gillian Anderson.

The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, is an enormous novel published in nine volumes between 1759 and 1767. It is a fictional autobiography, but the main point of the book is that Tristram can simply never get to the point. He digresses and procrastinates so much that he doesn't even get around to describing his birth, the first event of his life, until the third volume. The film, likewise, never quite gets to the start of the story, instead focusing – with great humour – on its own troubled adaptation process.

Not only is Tristram Shandy very, very long, but the story doesn't make sense without a consideration of the style that it's written in. But this movie gets right what The Unbearable Lightness of Being gets so wrong. The story is completely different (in as much as it has a story at all), but Lawrence Sterne's central joke about storytelling shines through, translated intact into film.