In our latest Film Studies series, filmmaker and educator Patricia Gruben – founder of the Praxis Centre for Screenwriters – unpacks different approaches to writing for the screen, focusing here on adaptation from literary sources.
Stanley Kubrick’s war film is based on two sources — Gustav Hasford’s novella The Short-Timers, which reads like a tortured diary of his dehumanizing stint as a military correspondent in Vietnam, and Dispatches, a nonfiction account by Michael Herr of his own trauma as a front line journalist, which he revisited in the script for Apocalypse Now. Both authors worked on the screenplay, with Kubrick consolidating their scenes into an absurdist nightmare that denies cause-and-effect story logic; it seems that in Vietnam, there was none.
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Patricia Gruben is a filmmaker and former associate professor of film at Simon Fraser University, as well as founder and long-time director of Praxis Centre for Screenwriters (now the Screenwriters Lab at the Whistler Film Festival.) Her films have been screened at TIFF, VIFF, Sundance and the New York Film Festival, and her writing on film has appeared in international academic and popular journals. Her new feature film Heart of Gold will be released in 2025.
2:00 pm
2:30 pm
Patricia Gruben
Stanley Kubrick
Matthew Modine, Adam Baldwin, Vincent D’Onofrio
USA/UK
1987
English
Book Tickets
Indigenous & Community Access
Credits
Screenwriter
Stanley Kubrick, Michael Herr, Gustav Hasford
Cinematography
Douglas Milsome
Editor
Martin Hunter
Original Music
Vivian Kubrick
Production Design
Anton Furst