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The Moment I Fell in Love With Film

    This Valentine's Day, LBB's Tom Loudon asked directors and producers around the world how their lifelong romance with film was ignited

    Published by: Little Black Book
    Date: 14/02/2025

    This Valentine’s Day, we’re turning the spotlight on the moments that sparked a lifelong love affair with filmmaking.

    Verity Snow, senior content producer – Amplify, UK


    When Books Come to Life On-Screen

    My love of film started with books. Stories and characters first imagined in my head, then reshaped and immortalised on screen. Ken Kesey’s 'One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest' harrowingly living on as Jack Nicholson. Lewis Carroll’s 'Alice in Wonderland' and the rabbit hole of re-imaginings. Roald Dahl’s 'The Witches' and those disgusting long fingernails.

    Some adaptations never quite satisfied. 'The Chronicles of Narnia' — my Mr. Tumnus existed far from Disney’s.

    At university, I studied English Literature, screenwriting, and adaptation. My professors were novelists who had seen their text translated for screen. I still remember Giles Foden’s lecture on 'The Last King of Scotland'. How historical fiction further complicates the contract with the audience.

    Once, the narrator lived in the book. The reader owned the film rights. Now? Smaller screens. More narrators. Adaptations born from algorithms.

    Virginia Woolf called cinema a lesser art. In 1926, she wrote, "Cinema has been born the wrong end first. The mechanical skill is far in advance of the art to be expressed."

    I wonder what she’d think of TikTok? Of AI? A century on, are we still lagging behind the mechanics?

    Adaptation is why I was drawn to produce. Bridging treatment and content, guiding how stories are told. And my love of film is still rooted in words.

    In the conversation after the credits roll. In reading the review on the bus home.

    To read the full article, visit Little Black Book.

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