Julian Schnabel, right, directs Mathieu Amalric on the set of The

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. 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” and Jean-Dominique Bauby’s memoir “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly,” seemed impossible to adapt because they were too complicated, too internal.

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.”

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Veteran Ronald Harwood already has an Oscar for adapting 2002’s “The Pianist,” but still found himself pacing his Paris flat for weeks, trying to figure a way into “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly.” The late author, Bauby, was the editor of French Elle who suffered a paralyzing stroke at 43 and used his left eyelid to blink out what he wanted to say, letter by letter. Harwood tried to blink the alphabet to get into Bauby’s head and it drove him mad.

Finally, it occurred to him to begin from Bauby’s woozy, obscured perspective in the hospital room.

“That was my breakthrough,” said Harwood, whose script was nominated for a Golden Globe and who has a new book of his own on the subject, “Ronald Harwood’s Adaptations: From Other Works Into Films.” “I thought, ‘This is the story I could tell – the story of his illness.’ And the camera did the blinking – that was my idea, because it did two things: It gives the audience the sense of what it’s like to have locked-in syndrome, and the second thing it did was that they didn’t have to look at him for two hours, which would have been dreadful.”

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Aaron Stockard was terrified to meet author Dennis Lehane while adapting “Gone Baby Gone,” his first produced screenplay, with director and longtime friend Ben Affleck. The crime drama comes from one of Lehane’s books about a pair of private eyes in a rough part of Boston, and has made an awards frontrunner of supporting actress Amy Ryan as a junkie mom.

“When he came on set for the first few times I intentionally avoided him. I felt like (he must have thought), ‘What in the world is this kid doing taking this story I wrote, with characters I’ve written six books about, and making these changes?”‘ Stockard said of Lehane, who also wrote “Mystic River.” “But I kind of kept reminding myself, this needs to stand on its own. And I can’t do it to please him and I can’t do it to please fans of the book.”

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In determining what to cut and what to keep from “Lust, Caution,” based on a short story about passion and betrayal by revered Chinese writer Eileen Chang, co-writer James Schamus said the key is to remember always that you’re making a movie. “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.”

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Paul Thomas Anderson only used about the first 100 pages of “Oil!” for “There Will Be Blood,” the story of a volatile oilman which has Globe nominations for best picture and actor Daniel Day-Lewis. 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.

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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. 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 – quote unquote – be inspired by a true story.”