‘Arthur the King’ Screenwriter Shares Tips for Adapting a Memoir for the Big Screen

The new film, Arthur the King, stars Mark Wahlberg as a competitive adventure racer named Michael Light (inspired by the real-life Swedish athlete Mikael Lindnord), whose life changes after giving meatballs to a stray dog while on a dangerous race in the Dominican Republic. As the dog begins following Michael and his team, which includes Leo (Simu Liu) and Olivia (Nathalie Emmanuel), an unbreakable, life-changing bond forms between Michael and Arthur that doesn’t leave a dry eye in the house.

“The Power of What We Do”

Arthur the King screenwriter Michael Brandt is best known for writing action films such as 2 Fast 2 Furious (2003), 3:10 to Yuma (2007), and Wanted (2008), so it may seem odd that he was hired to adapt Lindnord’s 2016 memoir, Arthur: The Dog Who Crossed the Jungle to a Find a Home. But Brandt says his experience spending the last few years developing and writing the Chicago shows (Chicago Fire, Chicago Med, Chicago Justice, and Chicago P.D.) for NBC has changed him as a person and a writer. 

Part of Brandt’s job developing those TV shows required him to spend countless hours with first responders in Chicago. “It helped tap into a different part of me. When you’re out spending time with firefighters and cops and paramedics, and you see what they go through, the idea of doing another Fast and Furious movie was not really in the cards at that point. I’m not suggesting I was asked or going to do one. I’m just saying I had a different perspective on the power of what we do,” says Brandt. 

Developing a Strategy: A Sports Movie With a Dog

After reading Lindnord’s memoir and watching an ESPN documentary about their story, Brandt flew to New York to meet with Lindnord and discuss a strategy for adapting his memoir. 

“I told Mikael, ‘I want to do a sports movie with a dog. Let’s not do a talking dog or where you hear the dog’s internal monologue. Let’s do a movie that Mikael would go see, and sports guys, adventure racers, football fans, basketball fans, all would want to go see,” says Brandt.

It’s a great strategy, considering that a sports movie will have built-in tension and stakes. Brandt says his brain is filled with classic sports movies, so employing the genre tropes came naturally to him. 

“Field of Dreams, The Natural, Hoosiers—all the classics are just naturally in my Rolodex. It’s very easy for me to tap into what those movies need to provide. Those moments of doubt, those moments of victory, those moments of pain. The moments of questioning whether you’re valid or not and valuable enough to deserve to win. All of those tropes are so successful and for a good reason,” says Brandt.

Read More: Why Book Adaptations Make Great TV

Creating a Satisfying Character Arc

Brandt had one big question for Lindnord: How did Arthur change him? It’s a question that wasn’t fully answered in the memoir. The answer would be the basis of the character arc that Brandt would create for his protagonist, Michael Light (Wahlberg). He delved into Lindnord’s personal life, including his marriage and family. 

“Not that we were going to use those [details] verbatim in any sense at all, but I wanted to understand who Mikael was before Arthur and after. And he was very open. He was very honest,” says Brandt. 

They talked a lot about Lindnord’s father and the demands his father put on him. Lindnord was expected to be a very masculine, tough guy who’s good at hockey, goes into the military, and never relies on others. “This is a guy who never really had a relationship where he was really close to someone other than his wife. He’s never been selfless before, and then here comes somebody [Arthur the dog] who teaches him about that,” says Brandt. 

Read More: Understanding the 3 Types of Character Arcs

The First Steps of Adapting a Book

It seems obvious that reading the book you plan to adapt is the first step, but for Brandt, it was important to read it without an agenda. During my interview with Brandt over Zoom, he brought out his dog-eared copy of Lindnord’s memoir.

“This is the copy I had,” he says while flipping through the pages, showing me where he marked them. “And I read it completely agnostically. I just put lines on anything that interests me. I’m trying not to think about the movie, but, you know, just highlight and underline things. And then I put it away,” he says.

A trick he learned from writing television is to take all the big moments in the story and put them up on a whiteboard—they become signposts telling him where he is in the story and where he is heading. 

“That’s an end of Act One. That’s an end to Act Two. OK, now let’s just start building from there. You know, I’m pretty mechanical in that sense. And then coloring it all in once I kind of get those two or three signs in the field. Then, I go back to the book when I feel like I’m stuck. I really try, and write it separately from my experience of reading it,” he says.

Challenges While Adapting the Script

In Brandt’s first draft of the screenplay, the audience doesn’t meet Arthur until Michael meets Arthur—which is at the end of Act One. Brandt says it was a mistake. “I think my first instinct, looking back, was definitely wrong,” he says. 

Read More: What is Three-Act Structure and How Do You Use It in Screenwriting?

He didn’t want to include shots of Arthur by himself, running around the city, because he wanted to focus on setting up Michael’s journey.  

“The end result was we didn’t see Arthur until 35 or 40 minutes into the movie in the first draft I wrote. But it was pretty obvious to everyone that that wasn’t going to work. So we kind of came up with some fun storylines for what we thought Arthur went through before he had that meatball with Michael,” he says. Arthur the King now introduces both characters early on but separately—until their paths finally collide. 

Another challenge Brandt faced while adapting the book was that Lindnord’s real-life teammates didn’t fit neatly into the story he was trying to tell.

“In the story, the characters that Mikael really raced the race with are not the characters in the movie. And that kind of came out of talking with Mikael, and I think a little of their reluctance to being portrayed in the movie as who they were. So, I had a conversation with a couple of them and pretty quickly realized that—to put it delicately—things along the race didn’t necessarily go smoothly. One of them got sick, and one of them maybe didn’t want the dog around the whole time. So, for the sake of everybody, it was better to come up with three new characters to go on the ride who are just kind of representative of the people who really run the race,” says Brandt. 

Read More: 3 Types of Supporting Characters Your Protagonist Needs

Bringing the Dog to Life on the Page

Unless you’re writing a dog movie where the dog expresses his thoughts through a voiceover or maybe even talks, there’s no way to know exactly what the dog is thinking. But considering Arthur the dog is one of the main characters in Arthur the King, Brandt knew it was important to make Arthur’s thoughts clear in the screenplay. 

“I think two or three times when Arthur was alone [in a scene], I just italicized what Arthur was thinking so the reader of the script and whoever was ultimately shooting the script and lighting the movie and all of that, understand what we’re going for in a cinematic, verbal way,” he says. But he also liked keeping some of Arthur’s thoughts a mystery. 

“I really liked that idea that maybe there’s just something about him that we’ll never understand, and we just have to appreciate him for it,” he says. 

A Theater Optimist

Arthur the King came in third place at the box office on opening weekend, which is great news for Brandt and movies in general.  

“I’m just ecstatic it’s in theaters. In 2024, it’s really satisfying to have something in theaters that people have to make an effort to see because I think you just watch it with a different level of intent and absorption [than watching movies at home]. And I hope we never lose that,” he says, adding that he thinks the cinematic experience is something that will stick around for a while. 

“I’m a theater optimist, for sure. But movies like this have to do well—not just the superhero movies. We need more of these kinds of movies!” he says. 

Arthur the King is currently playing in theaters.

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