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How do?

Long title is long, but as a genuine mark of respect to an author who wasn’t just fantastic, but genuinely improved my life.

And this thread about some of his creations that rank amongst my favourites. And quite possibly are (depending on exactly which novel I’m reading at a given time, such is his work) my absolute favourites.

And if you’ve not guessed by now, it’s the Lancre Witches.

In the books, they’re just so incredibly human. Granny Weatherwax, Nanny Ogg and Magrat. In reverse, The Maiden, The Mother, and, erm, The Other One.

And I fear it’s Granny Weatherwax, as an incredibly traditional and cultural conservative (not the real world take on conservative, because no politics) that I fear makes such tales unfilmable.

See, for the uninitiated? Esme Weatherwax is neither hero not antihero. She’s a good person, but inherently pragmatic. She doesn’t really do empathy, like, at all. She just Gets Things Done. Indeed, I’d say her narrative lack of compassion makes her the Avatar of Pragmatism. She’ll just do what needs doing, and accept the personal consequences.

In the books, with the additional explanation between lines of dialogue, and the exceptionally humorous footnotes, her relationship to the other Lancre Witches worms beautifully. They clearly set out that she’ll get the job done, and if you are at all fussy about how the job got done? Yup should’ve asked someone else.

Think Garak from DS9 but minus an ego.

It’s even commented upon in the books that she’s not actually someone noviciate Witches are meant to lookup to. But they should learn from her, and respect.

Best of all? Best of all? In all the books, she very, very rarely has to resort to Witchcraft. Instead, she relies on what we’re reliably informed is ‘headology’. People fear her because *reasons*. People respect her and pay homage because all the time they have, the *reasons* haven’t occurred since

And I’m just not sure you can capture that on celluloid the way you can on paper. And without that, the Lancre Coven just doesn’t work sufficiently to make the stories they’re involved in work.

I think most of Pratchett's stuff translates poorly to the screen because nothing can match his prose and the inner monologues of his characters. I have been re reading the Discworld novels from the start and there is nothing as good as it.

I was not particularly disappointed by the other adaptations because I have low expectations, but the best experience of Pratchett is through reading the novels.

It would be impossible to directly transport Lancre Witches (and particularly, Granny) to silver screen, but something like a good analogue could be done if the casting choice is good. It comes down to actress to project the personality and certain menace which Granny has.

I agree that Discworld stories are hard/impossible to film. I thought 'Colour of Magic' was quite awful, 'Hogfather' was acceptable.

I think Pratchett's work can work as moving pictures (and the last adaptions were okay/good by themselves but it felt like it's more about Pratchett branding/IP and lacking a bit of his style). I think his work would work better when animated instead of with real actors, sets, and props. That bit of stylisation (and not being so damn real) gives you the freedom to be flexible with your visual storytelling and adapt more of his wordplay instead of "just delivering the dialogue/content/story".

Backfire wrote:
It would be impossible to directly transport Lancre Witches (and particularly, Granny) to silver screen, but something like a good analogue could be done if the casting choice is good. It comes down to actress to project the personality and certain menace which Granny has.

I agree that Discworld stories are hard/impossible to film. I thought 'Colour of Magic' was quite awful, 'Hogfather' was acceptable.

Eh. The ones I've seen so far are mostly let down by the actors and effects.
Going Postal worked fairly well, but the problems it did have weren't down to some sort of 'unfilmable' quality to Pratchett novels.

Adjustments have to be made for a new medium, but nothing is inherently 'unfilmable.'
Though I do agree with Mario. Going animated for Fantasy stories tends to produce better quality. Hogfather certainly would have been significantly better without the effects grinding out mediocrity and some of the actors doing the same. Big budget or go home is a real problem.



Good Omens was certainly the opposite of unfilmable and had plenty of 'Pratchettness' and distinct characters.

I think they will not work simply because the people that would make them lack either the skill or the will to make them work.

They would take the characters and cast big name actors for all the roles and that would be stage 1 of the screw up, helen mirran as Weatherwax, melissa mccarthy as Ogg, whatever crumpet of the month as Magrat and of course race bending and gender bending other characters for the diversity quota and that is all before we even get to the script which will be written by a load of humourless people who know nothing about the setting and do not care and will force whatever vogue political cause they are following into the movie...... So no, I do not think any of the Pratchett novels can be made at the moment and in the current hollyweird climate

I think they could work in film, they've already worked decently well in animation - though the cartoons of them were very very dry in the voice acting; and the animation house of the time lacked the resources to do huge numbers of animated characters at once, but they did work.

Now I agree some books don't always translate well to film, esp when there's a narrator that does more than just tell it as it is and describe the scene. Now that can easily be resolved by the use of a film narrator, a feature that has somewhat lost its popularity with many modern film directors; even the intro text roll (starwars) or voiced narrators intro have lost favour. A shame in my view because often in those short moments they can set a scene very well.


Honestly with the right actors, right director and right approach yes they could work. I think adapting something like Assassin's Apprentice by Robin Hobb would be a much harder affair due to the huge amounts of internal thinking that are displayed upon the pages and which strongly influence how we interpret the actions we see the lead character make. Indeed without them I think our impression of Fitz would be very very different. Though a skilful writer and director can get that in too, they just have to be bold and risk adding scenes and elements to convey that information to the audience. Now the Fool in those books would be far harder to achieve because part of the Fool's character and mystery is hard to convey in a "not obvious" way in film, whilst in the books the author takes advantage of that grey area of description to allow the character to flit around and fool the reader somewhat, as well as the rest of the cast.

I thought that Hogfather was fine. To the point that I bought the DVD for Christmas film watching - It's a Wonderful Life can suck it...

Colour of Magic was not good. Whoever in casting thought "Okay, we have David Jason and Nigel Planer on board - who should we get to play Rincewind?" seriously didn't have a clue.

I didn't get the Witches books when I was a teenager. The cleverness and dry observations on the human condition passed me by, which makes me think that there's no way to do them justice on screen.

I think Pratchett novels in general are not easy to turn into film/TV. I've been fairly disappointed with most of the live action stuff but, as others have said, I don't think it's down to them being completely unfilmable. Mostly it was casting/pacing issues. For them to work I think someone would need to figure out how to convey all that non-dialogue information that was crammed into the novels (all those footnotes were often among the funniest parts of the books). That takes more than just going through the books and pulling out all the dialogue and transferring it to a script, which is how it feels to me they approached the previous filmed material.

Maybe a good approach would be to take one of the more stand-alone books and do that first? Something like Small Gods or Pyramids might be easier due to the self-contained nature of them.

You'd need to do some clever work to transfer the inner thoughts of the characters to dialogue or action. The same is true of Dune; the Lynch version had an awful lot of "as you know ..." exposition, so let's see how Denis Villeneuve manages.

I agree about going Postal; the main deal-breaker for me was the foam-rubber golems; most of the rest of the changes worked OK (in fact, the baclkstory of Adora Belle seems to have leaked back into her character in Raising Steam).

The Witches stories are character pieces. Equal Rites is a straightforward one to do, as most of the setting is still "generic fantasy world", but past the point where the actual shape of the disc and the elephants and turtle are strictly relevant - put 'em in the opening titles and no need to waste time explaining them. It's also a rather relevant story, for those that like that sort of thing.

Don't forget the first Hitch Hikers film which had footnotes done by the narrator. With the right voice doing the narration it can work very well in the story and whilst its a different style to the "all moving forward, all action hollywood film" it can be done.


I think the real trick is having a writer/director/producer willing to take the film off the beaten track and do different things with it. BBC can do that, but as the foam golems show, they sometimes lack the big budget for special effects.

To me that's the big issue. A lot of the actual story and narration is easy provided you get the right actor in the right role; but the discworld is a mayhem of fantasy where even walking down the street should be a highly complex scene. It's the kind of thing that should be a chaos of action and activity which I don't think you'd get outside of lot of CGI or animation

I liked the foam golems! I'd much rather see a prop than incongruous CGI personally.

I’m wondering it the lack of actual Magic use by the Lancre Coven would confuse the uninitiated viewer?

I mean, the whole point of Granny Weatherwax is that’s shes so powerful, she doesn’t need to use Magic. I’m not sure how well that would translate?

 Overread wrote:

I think the real trick is having a writer/director/producer willing to take the film off the beaten track and do different things with it. BBC can do that, but as the foam golems show, they sometimes lack the big budget for special effects.

The Discworld adaptations have all been commissioned by Sky, not the BBC (they went halfers on Good Omens with Amazon instead). I doubt the production company would have been any different if they had been on the Beeb, but the budget constraints would have been.

The problem with the golems wasn't that they were rubber suits; it's that the main feature of ceramics is their rigidity - not something much in evidence in Going Postal.

Footnotes is a tricky thing to dramatise; Good Omens went a bit too heavy on the narration, I felt. My preference would be to ditch them, and accept that televised drama is a different medium to the written word. You can add some of them as background gags if need be - such as the extended one about figgins from Guards! Guards!


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
I’m wondering it the lack of actual Magic use by the Lancre Coven would confuse the uninitiated viewer?

I mean, the whole point of Granny Weatherwax is that’s shes so powerful, she doesn’t need to use Magic. I’m not sure how well that would translate?

There's quite a few moments in the books where she does use minor magics; Borrowing, for example. Or the mysterious nature of her herb patch, the wonky broomstick and suchlike. You can get all of those in to her introductory scene if need be, and then leave it be until she needs to do something really impressive. It would also work as a proper "woah!" moment for the audience - for three episodes all we've scene is an old woman with some esoteric knowledge and then boom! she's sending an entire country back in time, or facing down the queen of the elves or whatever.

 AndrewGPaul wrote:

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
I’m wondering it the lack of actual Magic use by the Lancre Coven would confuse the uninitiated viewer?

I mean, the whole point of Granny Weatherwax is that’s shes so powerful, she doesn’t need to use Magic. I’m not sure how well that would translate?

There's quite a few moments in the books where she does use minor magics; Borrowing, for example. Or the mysterious nature of her herb patch, the wonky broomstick and suchlike.

There's also the fact that "believe" makes some things "just work" on Discworld (kinda like orcs/orks in Warhammer). Granny Weatherwax is really good at manipulating stories to create that type of indirect magic. So while she's not twirling magic wands, she still manipulating "storytelling" magic to her needs.