Transmitted oral narrative — a story a director inherited by hearing, not inventing. Foundation myth passed through generations and communities.
You know the situation: A director sits in your production office and tells you a story his grandfather told him. No literary source, no off-the-shelf screenplay — but a yarn, a tale passed down orally, that has traveled through decades or generations. These stories have developed their own dramaturgy because everyone who passed them on has unconsciously optimized, sharpened, forgotten what doesn't work. They have already been told multiple times before they land in front of the camera.
The special thing about it: A yarn carries cultural DNA with it. It carries tonality, rhythm, sometimes even dialect or regional peculiarities — things that have to be painstakingly reconstructed in a conventional screenplay. When you film such a story, you don't work against the text, but with it. The director didn't 'invent' the story, but heard it, and now it's up to you to preserve that authenticity visually. This is a big difference from adapted literature or original composition.
In practice, this means: Yarns often work episodically or with jumps — that's not bad, that's a narrative style. They often have supernatural or fairytale-like elements because in oral tradition, reality is mixed with the wonderfully possible. The editing rhythm must respect these jumps, not smooth them over. And the lighting design — here it helps that the story already brings an atmospheric quality that you don't have to invent, but rather uncover.
Examples of such yarn adaptations can be found primarily in Irish, Scottish, West African cinema, and in foreign arthouse film. These stories work differently than Hollywood plot architecture. They tell themselves if you don't get in their way.