Given that so many novels experiment, I wonder whether anybody wrote a novel consisting entirely of quotation-marked dialogue and nothing else.....which could lead to anonymous characters. Maybe that's been attempted somewhere
I think I've seen occasional short stories like that, though I don't think it'd be sustainable for a whole novel. My first attempt at a submission to the
Star Trek: Strange New Worlds anthology contest way back when was written that way, because it took place entirely within the Q Continuum and thus there was no way to describe the characters, setting, or actions in human terms.
Of course, you could say that any novel told in the first person is essentially all quoted dialogue, especially if it's presented as a transcription of a tale the narrator is telling to a listener, like Peter David's
Star Trek: The Captain's Table: Once Burned, or large portions of at least two of the four canonical Sherlock Holmes novels (said portions having quotation marks around their entire text). But that's not the sort of thing you're talking about.
I suppose the closest thing to an "exact" screen adaptation of a book would be one where every line of dialogue is quoted verbatim, every action occurs as described in the book, every character and setting matches the book's physical description thereof, and nothing is altered, omitted, or added. But that would be quite difficult to achieve. For one thing, you'd probably need a 4- or 5-hour movie, unless it were a short novel. For another, finding actors who were perfect matches for both the look and the personality of the characters and had sufficient talent would be very hard to do. Also, what about the characters' internal monologues, the exposition given only in narration? You could have a narrator or voiceovers for that, but those aren't popular techniques in film these days.
The Hunger Games is a very faithful adaptation as far as it goes, but it can't go as deep into Katniss's inner thoughts and motivations as the book could, and while the book was strictly first-person from Katniss's POV, the film adds scenes from other perspectives to give information and context the book gave through narration. Even so, it left out some key things, like the whole reason for the title -- that the Games are accepted because they're presented as a charity event, an opportunity for starvation-stricken districts to win ample supplies of food and resources, rather than just the arbitrary punishment ritual they were in the film. The whole starvation angle is really glossed over in the film, which I found a very strange oversight.
That's the thing. Moving from one medium to another is an act of translation between different languages -- the verbal and conceptual language of prose and the visual and temporal language of film. Every translator has to make judgment calls about how best to translate between languages, and some information will invariably be lost or altered in the process. And no two translators will agree on which information is most important to preserve, or what the best equivalent will be.
