Paul’s Case as a film

by Jasmine Destafano

The story that I would like to make a film about is Paul’s Case by Willa Cather. If I were to make a film based on this text, I would choose for it to be a rated R stop motion film, because I believe I can get more creative with using stop motion instead of just standard animation, and rated R because of the ending of the text, that I am going to change in my film adaptation. I would be able to highlight Paul’s views on the world and add a colorful and vibrant over-the-top setting for the way Paul sees life around him. An example of this could be when Paul hears a symphony, getting himself lost in the music, and then returning to his reality. For this scene, I would change the color scheme to a very vibrant and colorful one, making little stop-motion music notes fly across the screen as Paul sits there in amazement. Once the symphony ends, I would have a transition where it cuts back to Paul sitting with a more bored and depressed expression on his face, changing the colors to black-and-white. I would change the scenes where it shows Paul’s actual life to make it look bleaker and duller, with a more black-and-white color scheme. I would not do anything crazy regarding the camera angles and how the film is shot, because again, I would like it to be stop motion. Any dramatic camera effect would make the film look strange, in my opinion–and not in a good way. I would use instrumental music for the soundtrack, when Paul is viewing a more vibrant world, I would add cheerful and somewhat calm music, and when Paul’s actual life is shown, I would add a more upsetting and depressing instrumental track.  

The only significant change I would make to this story is the ending. Unlike the true ending of Paul’s Case where Paul ends up killing himself by jumping into a train, I would like to change this to Paul’s death being caused by his father. Since it mentions in the text early on about Paul’s father mistaking him for a burglar and shooting him in a seemingly hypothetical incident, I would like to have Paul’s father being the one who takes Paul’s life, rather than himself. I would set this scene up with Paul struggling to fall asleep, then leaving the house and exploring the vibrant city, with Paul’s false idea of what the world is like, regaining hope for himself and returning to his home. He will make some sort of commotion, alerting his father, still with the happy and false reality that Paul is seeing, and then being shot dead—this is where the cheery-vibrant colorful world comes to an end, with everything turning bleak and black-and-white the moment he gets shot. I feel like this would make the story more impactful, with Paul finding hope for himself and the future, and then his whole future being cut to an end once he returns home.