LOS ANGELES -- David Benioff was sitting on a plane, having a perfectly pleasant conversation with an elderly passenger about his job as a screenwriter, when he mentioned that he was working on an adaptation of "The Kite Runner."

"She grabbed my arm and said, 'That's my favorite novel. Don't change a word!' "

Based on the international best-seller about a man who returns to Afghanistan to right a childhood wrong, "The Kite Runner" is one of an inordinately large number of films in this year's awards race that come from books.

Screenwriters like Benioff are acutely aware of the inevitable comparisons between book and movie, and face the daunting challenge of telling a cinematic story that will resonate with audiences while remaining somewhat true to the source material.

Sure, every year there are several book-club favorites that turn up at the multiplex. Perusing the list of Academy Award best-picture winners can feel like a trip to Barnes & Noble, from "Gone With the Wind" and "The Godfather" to "The Silence of the Lambs" and "The English Patient."

But during this tumultuous, strike-hobbled awards season, at least a dozen movies with literary roots have real shots at winning the biggest prizes. Some of those novels, like Khaled Hosseini's "The Kite Runner," are beloved and readers feel proprietary about them.

Others, like Ian McEwan's "Atonement," which won best drama and musical score at the Golden Globes on Sunday night, and Jean-Dominique Bauby's memoir, "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly," which won the directing prize for Julian Schnabel and the foreign-language film honor, seemed impossible to adapt because they were too complicated, too internal.

The adaptations themselves range from the Coen brothers' "No Country for Old Men," which maintained much of Cormac McCarthy's rich Texas vernacular, to Paul Thomas Anderson's "There Will Be Blood," in which the writer-director merely used Upton Sinclair's "Oil!" as a leaping-off point. Still others come from novellas ("Lust, Caution"), graphic novels ("Persepolis"), or are based on nonfiction works ("Charlie Wilson's War," "Into the Wild," "A Mighty Heart").

Benioff was lucky in that he'd read "The Kite Runner" before he got the job, and he'd started his screenplay before the book became a huge hit. Halfway through his first draft, though, he began to feel the pressure.

"It's an amazingly emotional story. People become attached to those characters and they really long for redemption for Amir, for him to make up for what he has done, to heal those wounds," he said.

As a novelist himself, having written "25th Hour" and adapted the screenplay for director Spike Lee, Benioff said he "felt an extra layer of pressure -- I didn't want to let Khaled down. I liked him a lot and respected him a lot and he was a real ally. … When it's your own book, you want the movie to be good but there's less pressure."

In determining what to cut and what to keep, "Lust, Caution" co-writer James Schamus says the key is to remember always that you're making a movie. The film is based on a short story about passion and betrayal by revered Chinese writer Eileen Chang.

"You have to keep that in mind -- not that you are in some way responsible to or beholden to the underlying work," said Schamus, the Focus Features chief who's also adapted "The Ice Storm," "Ride With the Devil" and "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" for his longtime friend, director Ang Lee. "The primary task is to make sure the movie is good, not to make sure you're faithful to any part of the underlying work. That doesn't mean you're disrespectful -- far from it."

Anderson only used about the first 100 pages of "Oil!" for "There Will Be Blood," the story of a volatile oilman, which earned Daniel Day-Lewis the Globe for dramatic actor. Still, that was a huge departure for the maker of the original ensemble pieces "Boogie Nights" and "Magnolia."

"The benefits of the adaptation was that it helped me do things that my natural instincts wouldn't lead me to do," Anderson said in a recent Associated Press story, acknowledging his inclination to "spin off the rails a bit more."

"It was like collaborating with somebody," he added.

John Orloff did have a collaborator in Mariane Pearl while adapting her memoir "A Mighty Heart: The Brave Life and Death of My Husband, Danny Pearl," about the murder of her journalist husband. (Angelina Jolie was up for a Globe for her starring performance, but the winner was Julie Christie for "Away From Her"; Orloff's script has earned him a Spirit Award nomination.) But he also went beyond her book to interview the people who investigated Pearl's death and present a fuller picture.

"I talked to Mariane constantly. It was both intimidating and really helpful," Orloff said. "Mariane, in person, is this incredibly open, giving partner in all this who wanted nothing more than having her story be told in the most accurate, dramatic way possible. That said, as a writer, I had this incredible -- and I think everyone who had anything to do with the film -- had this incredible onus and responsibility to get it right, and to make her feel we got it right.

"One reason I fell in love with 'A Mighty Heart' was because I didn't have to make stuff up," he added. "I didn't have to make changes. I didn't have to -- quote unquote -- be inspired by a true story."