Whalefall Writer Reveals The Biggest Difference Between The Book And The Movie (Exclusive)

When it comes to adapting a book to the big screen, it feels like a lateral move to hire the author of the novel to rewrite their story for the film version. After all, they’re the one most familiar with the material, and there’s little to no preparation needed, so you’re saving time already, right? In most cases, this choice does tend to be a decent enough way to ensure that the best elements of a book are kept intact. Yet, it doesn’t mean that the process is made any easier creatively. Certainly not for the writer themselves, who now faces more restrictions on their imagination, not less.

That’s exactly the case with Daniel Kraus and “Whalefall.” The book, published in 2023, features an eye-catching, unique structure, in which each chapter and section vacillates between the attempts of Jay Gardiner (played in the film by Austin Abrams) to escape the belly of a whale he’s accidentally been swallowed by and his past experiences with his late father Mitt (Josh Brolin), whose remains he was attempting to find when the whale came upon him. Working in conjunction with director and co-writer Brian Duffield, Kraus was able to create a version of this structure that makes “Whalefall” just as engaging cinematically as it is on the page. 

However, this balance came at a cost. As Kraus told me during a recent interview, the biggest difference between his original book and the movie version are the flashback scenes, as he wound up dropping many of the smaller ones from his source material during the adaptation process. And while this wasn’t easy, Kraus was completely understanding of why this had to happen, especially since it resulted in a film he seems pleased with.

When reworking “Whalefall” for the movie version with co-writer and director Brian Duffield, Daniel Kraus came to realize that his book simply had too many flashbacks to fit into the film. The irony about that is these scenes happen to be the ones he found the most meaningful. As he explained to me:

“(T)he most meaningful scenes to me were the flashback scenes, and there’s so many and some of them were many pages long, and a lot of them are one sentence long. They’re sort of every shape and size, depending on Jay’s mental state inside the whale. So, a lot of those little bits were meaningful to me. That’s what you can do in a book that’s kind of unique, is you can put one sentence on a page, and let it sit there among the white space, kind of reverberate. That’s maybe more difficult to do in a movie.”

Indeed, a lot of what makes “Whalefall” special (both book and film) lies in the relationship between Jay’s plight inside the whale and its resonance when it comes to his troubled history with Mitt’s emotional and physical abuse. In other words, “Whalefall” couldn’t live without its flashback scenes, but Kraus had to be choosier about which ones survived. Knowing this to be the case going in, the process was mostly painless to Kraus:

“So, yeah, I don’t want to say it hurt to lose those, because of course you’re going to lose them. I can’t have 50 flashbacks. Brian and I are going to maybe work in five or six. So, it’s baked into the assignment that you’re going to be killing some of these darlings. That’s the job.”

“Whalefall” is in theaters everywhere.