How many liberties can a writer take dictating camera angles and perspectives? In the book I'm planning to change into a screenplay, a lot of things would make very little sense from a third person perspective. Is there a good example of a first person perspective on the screen?

I hope that this is the right place to put this, since it's a problem related to translating from page to screen in an adaptation...

Have a nice day!
Moya

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一生懸命がんばったら、何でも出来るでしょうね。だから、がんばりましょう！

Yes

See The Lady In The Lake. But it's a bit of a gimmick.

When I think of first person in movies, the first thing that comes to my mind is Fight Club. I'm not sure this is the kind of thing you're looking for, though.

"Kiss Kiss Bang Bang" used a similar technique (though without the big twist at the end) but in a more comedic and light-hearted way.
I guess a narrator voice-over is the most obvious solution for adapting a first person story. There might be more sublte ones, but since I'm not an expert at all I have no idea what they might be.

And, obviously, you wouldn't be able to have scenes without your POV character, but that goes without saying.

While I haven't seen any of the movies mentioned yet, I appreciate the help. I don't have any scenes without my POV character in them in the novel, but I think narration will be helpful. It's a pretty introspective novel. It was written in third person, but it worked out like that.

Thanks for the help!

Have a nice day!
Moya

I don't know about the other movie, but you could just look up trailers from the ones I mentioned. That would be enough to give you an idea how they did it.

Or are you maybe familiar with the series Scrubs? That one is also narrated by the main character and has a lot of internal monologue (rather silly ones most of the time but still).

They played with this sometimes in the old German Expressionist movies too - "The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari" or a couple sequences in "Metropolis" come to mind. But their techniques basically only work if the narrator character is insane. (...Wow, I'm such a film nerd. LOL.)

Confessions of a Shopaholic also tackled this, a humorous first person novel with a lot of internal. In the movie, she talks to mannequins.

I'm adapting my first person novel, but I am excited to be able to add scenes that the main character cannot see, which was hard to work around in the book. So my adaptation will change to omniscient for the screen, a more typical style. I find that having some characters (and the audience) know things the main character doesn't is great to add tension and in my case, comedic effect.

Yeah, I think it'd be possible. It would be really cool if (when or if) you adapt it to film, it's all indie like it was filmed from a handheld. There's some movie I saw thast was like that, but my mind just blanked on the title.

Definitely, yes. I have a project out making the rounds now (It was my Screnzy attempt last year; I didnt finish it for a few months afterwards) in which everything is seen through this helmet-cam worn by (mostly) the MC and (briefly) his girlfriend. It was a real challenge to tell the story within such a limitation, but it worked.

I'm adapting my first-person short story, and I agree with helenathemuse that having some things out that the MC doesn't know definitely adds to the story ... but it's easier for us to add other scenes, because we wrote the originals ... I'm not sure I'd attempt this with something someone else wrote ...

But anyway, I wish you luck!