To fight the virus, Captain Trip,
there is nothing better than Weinbaum's Laboratory.
News flash.
An explosion at Dairy College took place this afternoon.
It's believed to be due to a gas leak.
Four people are reportedly dead.
Inequity, and in sin my mother conceived me.
Behold, thou desirest truth in the inward parts
and in the hidden part thou shalt make me to know wisdom.
Hey, how can I help you?
Can I have a green tea, please?
Sure.
Thanks.
If you're going to Cousin Town,
you should take the shortcut.
It's just the first exit up I-95.
Once you see the black house hang a left.
You'll be there in no time.
Breaking news just in.
A state prisoner escaped this morning.
Maybe with the help of others.
We advise all citizens to remain vigilant.
Welcome to the Running Man!
Tonight, he's in Hardin, Tomorrow
in New York, Boise, Albuquerque, Columbus,
skulking outside your home.
Will you report him?
Run, run, run, run, run, run, run, run, run, run.
Run for...
Cujo.
How many times do I have to tell you
you're going to fry your brain using that thing?
Have you seen the Reverend George Winston lately?
Ever since his wife died, he hasn't been the same.
I heard he stayed with the body for five days
before calling a mortician.
Richie.
I'll have the... a lucky devil.
Did you hear Brenda won $2,700 last time she played?
And... ooh, give me a...
an American Grain.
Thanks, Richie.
Say hi to Miss Sidley for me, will you?
Will do, Willy Wilmington.
Hi, Nona.
How can I help you?
It escaped again.
I hope it behaved well.
Picture perfect.
Nice.
Did you take the shortcut?
You've done well.
Take it to the master.
He's in the back.
Everybody who hasn't read a Stephen King could've still
seen a Stephen King movie.
The Stand, The Dead Zone or Cujo or...
Shawshank Redemption, The Green Mile.
I mean, all the Frank Darabont ones, all the Rob Reiner ones.
Stand by Me...
I thought it was terrific.
Christine was such a good film,
and Carrie was such a good film.
It completely traumatized me.
Cat's Eye and Silver Bullet are two of my very favorites.
I adored them.
Creepshow had a massive impact, and it's unique
and it's stylized.
Dolores Claiborne was really good.
And 1408.
It's just such a descent into madness that in that movie
almost anything could happen at any moment.
Mick Garris did The Stand.
Misery is one of my favorites.
Pet Sematary is a great movie.
I love what he does with characters.
The Dark Half obviously was one that was successful.
Shining is pretty hard to get past.
Let's face it.
A lot of people came to his work because of the movies.
They probably started with the movies
and then discovered the books.
It all started with Carrie.
It was the movie that really brought a lot of attention
to Steve's work.
You couldn't miss Carrie, which
I remember seeing the movie before I had read the book.
The book was not well known until De
Palma's movie came out, and the movie blew me away.
It was so great.
I think that's the first time I became aware of who
he was back in 1976.
I was just struck by the story.
This character's journey and like what she is going through
with her mom and the bullying at school and then the powers
that she gets and how it works as a metaphor for her entrance
into womanhood.
It really does that perfectly.
Watching the whole transition of Carrie,
it was like Jekyll and Hyde.
King seemed to really bring that in there too, that ability
people have to just have this metamorphosis into something
that just wants to harm you.
From the way Brian De Palma uses the split screen
in the prom, to the car flipping over when they're trying,
to run her down on the road, to the whole ending sequence
with the mom and the house getting kind of crucified
to the door, the knives thrown in her too,
that final jump scare moment, which shows that jump scare
isn't always a dirty word.
Carrie wasn't really scary.
You just seeing her burn everything down at the end.
You're watching it, and it's thrilling.
I think it's more of a thriller than a horror picture.
To me, as in much of Stephen King's work,
Carrie is not just a horror film.
It's come to be a horror film because of the way
that it was first treated, but the way it's written,
it sort of has a string going through Stephen King's work.
When folks hear Stephen King, most of the time, especially
those who aren't super accustomed or knowledgeable
of his work, they think oh, the horror guy, which is not true.
Stephen King writes human beings,
and then he puts them in incredibly
pressured, difficult, sometimes phantasmagorical situations.
You know, you're dealing with characters who are just so
interesting and so fascinating.
Like he really knows how to explore it through characters
that you give a shit about.
Much of Stephen King's work seems to be
about how we treat each other.
There was no real horror genre in movies until Psycho.
Psycho brought that open and then there were a huge number
of people who followed it.
You know, we went through the '50s where we had great sci-fi
horror movies that were all about the strangeness of things
that could happen to us.
The horror that existed in the story
was really all about, oh, that's a great monster
or that's a scary situation.
When Steve came along in the '70s,
it was all about how people were affected by what happened,
and I think that he's changed horror and genre movie
making just by that alone.
He made it real for so many people
because he put brand names in.
All of a sudden you had people eating food that you ate
or using detergent that you used in your dishwasher.
It became very American and very recognizable.
And he also spread the word to a huge swath
of the American public.
You could say it's in the middle class.
And doing it in a way that is without pretense, that
speaks to the common people, is for
and about the common people.
He loves common people.
He loves folksy people, and he's got that dialogue down pat.
He doesn't condescend to them.
He doesn't condescend to middle Americans.
And I think that's important.
In many ways, he is a man of the people.
Instead of setting everything in big cities,
he chooses locations and environments that
are identifiable for everybody.
You could make name Pennsylvania,
you could make Maine the countryside of France,
you could make name a lot of different places
because we all have places like that.
We all have small towns and communities
and it allows the people and the characters
to emerge as opposed to being overwhelmed by, say,
a New York City environment.
Stephen King's identity is wrapped
up in almost small town horror.
It's much more relatable than, you know,
castle in Transylvania.
That's not what he does.
That can be scary too but that's not what he does
and I think the thing about these small American towns
is so interesting because it's not what you expect.
I think he is so deeply an American writer and writing
about America and the darkness that lurks
within the heart of America.
He just has that gift to kind of tap into what we all
can relate to and connect to and it
always feels sort of present time,
even if it's a period thing.
It always feels like America.
It's very kind of Norman Rockwell Americana.
It's an idealized America, but then it's
ripped apart and sent to hell.
No, please no!
It completely traumatized me.
My parents had refused to let me watch the miniseries,
and so I would watch it at a friend's house
when I was way too young really to discover Stephen King.
Hi, Ben.
Want a balloon.
Ben?
It was all over the airwaves in Australia
when it first came out, and that just terrified me.
Me and my friends, we had a video camera.
We'd recreate scenes from It.
It was just an obsession.
One of the first movies that I ever made with my friends
in the back yard was an adaptation of It actually.
When I was in seventh grade.
Horror movies in particular were always
kind of what I was drawn to and terrified of as a viewer.
When Tim Curry first appears down in the drain...
Aren't you going to say...
As a 11-year-old boy, there was nothing more terrifying.
Oh, come on, bucko.
Don't you want a balloon?
Tim Curry's performance as Pennywise
is the ultimate terrifying performance because he
plays it like a clown.
He doesn't play it like a monster.
He plays it like a birthday clown,
and that is so terrifying to me.
I do have to this day a fear of clowns and Tim Curry
in It is the reason for that.
Basically every time Pennywise appears in that movie,
it is truly terrifying to a kid.
I was so traumatized by trying to watch horror films,
but so interested in horror that I decided to switch over
to books and the very first book I picked up
when I was like 10 years old was It and that was a huge mistake.
I found myself in this really intense conflicted situation
where I didn't want to keep reading because I
was so frightened, and because I was having horrible nightmares.
But I cared so much about the losers club,
I cared so much about these beautifully rendered characters
that I had to keep reading.
It's basically piss and shit.
So I'm just telling...
By the end of it, I realized that he had created
an opportunity for me to learn how to be braver
in very small increments just to finish a chapter
or eventually to finish the book.
And that became a muscle that I would
try to exercise as I got older and what I think
really horror is all about.
It's exercise for courage in the same way
that we'd go to the gym to try to get stronger physically.
Horror movies and horror stories can
help us practice being brave for a very short amount of time
in a completely safe space.
That journey started with It for me,
but carried me very quickly through all
of the available works by Stephen King
and he almost immediately became my hero.
When I hear stories about other people talking
about their first encounter with Stephen King
it was usually in childhood.
Certain works of art that you experience as a child imprint
on you in a way that I don't think they
can when you're an adult. And I am of a very particular
generation, that first generation of kids that were
exposed to Stephen King and it unquestionably
left an indelible mark.
Early 1980s, My dad had a giant library in our house
and on the very bottom shelf he had
a couple of Stephen King books.
He had the paperbacks of Carrie, he had the 'Salem's Lot
paperback that had pictures from the Tobe Hooper miniseries
in the middle, so you could see Barlow like right
before he was going to get staked.
And so I knew the logo for Stephen King's name on books
before I could even read.
Stephen King was a big part of my childhood
and I think a lot of people's childhoods
in the 1980s and the 1990s.
I think kids flocked to Stephen King
because he wrote true, authentic teenage characters
and kid characters.
And if he got you when you were young, he had for life.
Tweet, tweet.
He rocks in the treetop all day long.
Hoppin' and a-boppin' and a-singing his song.
All the little birds on Jaybird Street
love to hear the Robin go tweet, tweet, tweet.
Rockin' robin...
One of the other ones that really had an impact on me
was Stand by Me.
When I first saw it, I didn't connect to Stephen King.
I thought it was a wonderful drama about coming of age
and at the end of the film when Stephen King's name came up,
I remember being shocked that someone who I associated so
much with horror was capable of creating
something so beautiful.
Stand by Me I grew up with.
My best friend, and I would leave our homes
to go try to go on a journey to find a dead body
and try to find train tracks, and we'd
go down ditches all day and be like we're
going to go find the body.
And, you know, we wished we were in that movie.
So that was really a touchstone movie
that to me when I think about Stephen King,
I don't ever think about horror.
I always think about how I felt when I read it
or the feelings it gave me and the characters.
And when I think of my favorite Stephen King movies,
I think of Stand by Me and the Shawshank Redemption.
I remember seeing Stand by Me and was just so taken with it.
I just loved it so much.
In fact, it's because of Stand by Me that I took Shawshank,
the script, to Castle Rock because of Stand by Me
I felt that Castle Rock would really understand
the movie I was trying to make and happily
that's exactly what happened.
I remember, in fact, being on the set of Nightmare on Elm
Street 3 one night going hmm, should I
ask Steve for the rights to Shawshank or the Mist?
I finally went for Shawshank because it
was so character based, and Stephen King said yes.
Shawshank is different.
That's about redemption, that's about humanity, that's
about a man falsely imprisoned and trying to learn how to deal
with it and not go crazy.
It's what it makes you feel for the people,
it's the heart that it has in it.
You immediately fall in love with Red.
He's just this awesome character that you
would love just to listen to and watch
for the entirety of the film.
And of course, the main character Andy as well.
Inasmuch as the Shining means to horror fans,
the Shawshank Redemption means a lot
to fans that are looking for some kind of hope in the world,
that their lives can improve no matter how bad they get.
Well, it took five years for me
to actually get around to writing the script
after Steve gave me the rights.
I know I had a certain ambition for the creative aspect of what
I wanted that script to be and I didn't think
I was a good enough writer yet.
That's another thing I have to thank Stephen King
for, his patience.
Every once in a while, I would let him know that I still
wanted to do it and finally, one day, I felt ready,
and I wrote it in eight weeks sent it to Castle Rock.
Castle Rock came back to me...
Liz Glotzer who was one of their key development executives,
she's the first one who read the script there
and walked into her boss's office and said,
we have to make this movie.
She slapped it down on the desk and said if we don't make this,
I quit.
So Liz called me and said Rob Reiner read the script
and really loves it.
There was a moment when Rob expressed interest
in directing it himself.
In fact, Tom Cruise had read the script
and asked Rob if Rob wanted to direct it and with Tom in it.
Then Rob said, let's offer Frank a writing position.
Let's offer him a lot of money.
I thought about it for a day, you know,
but then I called them back and I said, you know what?
I want to stick with it.
I want to direct it myself because I really feel
this deep, deep in my marrow.
I feel this story very deeply, and if not this, then what
and if not now, then when?
When am I going to direct a movie that matters to me?
If you're remembered for anything,
it's for the kindness you show or the art you create.
You're not remembered for your bank account.
Nobody's impressed by that.
Nobody cares.
So yeah, it was a very handsome offer, but it was money.
It was just money.
And Rob was such a sweetheart and such a supporter
and a booster and a mentor.
He took no for an answer very graciously and gracefully.
Frank is one of the most consummate directors
I've ever worked with.
He loves movies more than anything in the world.
Him and Quentin Tarantino probably...
I don't know who loves movies more.
Frank really... he really loves it.
He agonizes over every single detail,
and it shows in his movies.
I mean, Shawshank Redemption is probably
one of the greatest American made movies of our generation.
And my memory is that, that wasn't the success
but has grown into people thinking it's
one of the best movies ever.
It's set in prison.
It doesn't have Sylvester Stallone or Van Damme in it.
It's not an action movie.
Clearly, it's a drama with Morgan and Tim.
It looks like a depressing movie.
There's no way you can cut the trailer together and convince
the audience that it's going to be something
they love for years to come.
So we had trouble getting people to show up,
and that was very, very disappointing, I have to admit.
Shortly thereafter... I thank Academy.
They nominated us for seven Academy Awards,
and we were one of the five Best Picture nominees that year.
The Shawshank Redemption, Nikki Marvin, producer.
And the Oscar goes to...
We didn't win a single award.
There was Forrest Gump.
Forrest Gump.
It's Forrest Gump's year.
They swept everything.
It's a great movie, so I'm not surprised.
It was that and Pulp Fiction and Four Weddings and a Funeral
and Quiz Show and Shawshank.
And everybody what is Shawshank?
I remember even being at the awards
and when Shawshank was announced, people
who were there would, go?
What movie?
Did we miss this?
So it so brought attention to the film in a way
that we could not have purchased by marketing or advertising.
That'll be one of those movies that people
hold on to it seems and I'm...
boy, I'm so grateful for that.
I think Stephen King likes those
contained situations where people are
stuck in one specific arena.
It's almost like a theater play.
From the situations comes a lot of challenging moments
between characters because they're
forced to challenge themselves and challenge others.
That's the theme obviously in The Mist
and The Shining and 1408, and the psychology
in this contained areas is interesting and a lot of things
are happening, a lot of things are coming
out because we get stuck.
Come on.
That's a situation that King likes to put his character in
and as we come out what we have learned
collectively from months of lockdown
is a challenging situation.
The device he uses being inside with nowhere to go.
He wants you to focus on what's happening,
not on what's happening outside in the world.
And in that environment, there's no escape.
You really have to face your demons.
I'm here because island folk know
how to pull together for the common good when they need to.
And that's what these people did.
Trapped on Little Tall in the storm of the century.
In the case of Rose Red, I think it's the same thing.
They were trapped within this controlled environment
where the house was controlling the characters.
He's so descriptive of his settings.
OK.
Very funny, but I want to leave all right?
I think that's what makes it scary and relatable,
because you could imagine it happened to you.
What is this?
What is happening to me?
On Nightmares and Dreamscapes, the autopsy room
too was really fun.
What is going on here?
Snake, why can't you see that?
Please, you can't do this.
You can't cut me up.
Help me.
Don't you realize I can still feel!
One really clear example of that dynamic is Misery.
We can all imagine it could happen to us.
We are all James Caan's character in that movie
and Kathy Bates is so freaking scary.
Last night, it came so clear.
I realized you just need more time.
Eventually you'll come to accept the idea of being here.
Paul, do you know about the early days
at the Kimberley Diamond mines?
Do you know what they did to the native workers
who stole diamonds?
Don't worry, they didn't kill them.
In the book, Annie Wilkes cuts his foot off with an ax.
So we sit down in the first meeting
and Rob goes, we can't cut his foot off.
There's a myriad of issues with it.
So they had pitched this idea of the hobbling.
And they broke for lunch, and they said,
OK, you guys get everything rigged up for lunch,
and then when we come back, we'll film it.
They all came back from lunch, and they're
like, what are you doing?
Like you're supposed to be ready.
I'm like well, those are the fake legs.
So they didn't know because we had disguised his leg so well.
Annie, for god's...
Shh, darling...
The first screening...
God's sake...
You could feel the oxygen being sucked out
of the theater when she raises the sledgehammer
because everybody at the same time goes...
all at once.
Almost done.
You don't even see it in close up.
You see it in wide.
You see her lift the sledgehammer
and it's the real sledgehammer and it's heavy,
and then when she swings and she hits it a second time,
you never see it.
And you don't need to see it.
It's so much about the sound effect.
Cut to the close up, and she says...
God, I love you.
It's when Stephen gets the combination of the humanity
along with the situation was terrifying,
and they can say it's horror.
But I think what Stephen does and also what I do
and what so many of us do really is suspense.
Those are people.
I mean, yes, the situation is one of rising dread.
But you're looking at people.
The secret is in the casting and I think
that's the same for any role.
John Ford used to say it's 70% of the job.
You make the right choice and you're more than halfway there.
And the Oscar goes to Kathy Bates in Misery.
Kathy Bates is brilliant actress.
She'd won the Academy Award for Misery.
I'd like to thank William Goldman for bringing
the wonderful, crazy Annie Wilkes
to the screen and Stephen King for thinking
of her in the first place.
And Misery was a real Stephen King crazy thing
and Kathy Bates was great in the role.
Dolores was a very different role...
strong, tough, but nuanced.
If you want to know somebody's life, you look at the hands.
The challenge to me and the thing that was probably
most interesting to me is that Dolores
Claiborne is a woman's movie.
The three main characters are women.
The women rule this movie.
Why I go through 20 years of hell?
Why mother?
I have a friend, Larry Kasdan, who's a great director.
His son and went to Columbia.
During the first semester back at Christmas,
I happened to run into them and Larry's son said, you know,
I took this film class and the teacher was a woman
and was trying to communicate the fact that there are
no women stories out there and that you
need to have filmmakers who understand women.
And she was going to show Dolores
Claiborne to say Taylor is often times
used for men or women, right?
And that Taylor Hackford, this woman who had directed Dolores
Claiborne, really understands the women in this,
the four women that are here.
It's a brilliant woman's story.
And this... Larry Kasdan's son sat down and said,
well, I just want to say, I know Taylor Hackford, he's a man.
No, he's not.
No man could make this story.
Could I have a better compliment than that?
It was great, but it all started with Stephen King.
He had the inspiration.
Stephen King created the characters.
You better sit back down, Joe, if you
don't want this in your head.
Mommy...
Dolores is heroic.
How does a mother deal with incest?
A lot of them know it and just go along with it.
Dolores was not about to ignore it.
Dolores understood the horror of what her husband
was putting this child through.
It had to be repaid and she did.
I thought that was Stephen King. All Stephen King.
The only thing you're going to get
is a long stretch in Shawshank prison for child molesting.
God damn bitch.
I think that Stephen King probably
had a Delores in his life.
The way she was described, the way all the women
were described was so real.
My mother had a very difficult life,
and she still provided for me by working her ass off.
When I wrote him, I just said, listen, I see
my mother in this character.
Stephen King can write women.
He really can.
Stephen King has a knack for writing
terrific female characters and I think
he would credit a lot of that to his wife Tabitha
and her influence on him throughout his life.
And a lot of his books, especially his most personal
with some of the most fascinating heroines
are dedicated to Tabitha and her sisters
and other women in his life who are very powerful figures.
He was raised by a powerful and strong single woman.
His relationship with his mother shapes his writing quite a bit,
and he goes into very moving detail
about that and on writing and a lot of his interviews.
I think he's a man who grew up in the presence
and under the influence of remarkable women
and who married a remarkable a woman who, in a lot of ways,
is responsible for the biggest points of inflection
in his career and in his personal life.
If you listen to him talk about Tabitha
and you realize that she pulled the manuscript of Carrie
out of the trash can when he threw it
in there in complete despair, when you imagine her being
the first set of eyes on one of his stories
and giving him that first critical feedback,
when you imagine some of the stories he tells
about their marriage not only kind
of in his fictionalized versions of it,
but in on writing when he talks about how she came to him
and made him confront his addiction,
it's very easy to see where he gets
a lot of that fortitude and kind of mettle
that his heroines have.
I think he has that at home.
He came from a broken home as I did.
His parents split up early and he
was raised by a single mother, very blue
collar, real hardscrabble life.
And his work is often about the fractured family.
Your family is the place where you're supposed to feel safe.
The outside world is the other, your family is you.
And if that starts to crumble, if that starts to present
danger and horrifying circumstances to you,
you're not safe anywhere.
If you can't be safe within the family unit,
how can you possibly expect to survive?
And I think that theme running through a lot of Stephen King's
work is actually what adds to the terror
that we feel as we either witness or read these stories.
Whether it's the family and Cujo and what
they're going through before the dog actually shows up
or what's happening in The Shining between Jack and Wendy.
The first time I encountered Stephen
King was through The Shining, the book The Shining.
I read that and I was just blown away.
I just thought this was the most amazing thing.
I had to stop reading it.
I think I was in a remote lodge in the mountains somewhere.
It was very similar to the Colorado wilderness
that the hotel The Shining's in.
It really creeped me out.
The book club by accident sent me The Shining.
I was going to send it back because I didn't have the money
to buy it, but I opened the book and it
random it was the paragraph where
the dead woman sits up in the bathtub,
and I thought, oh, I have to...
I have to read this book.
When I read The Shining, I think
that's the first time I was enchanted
by the voice of the writer.
When you go inside Jack Torrance's head,
you connect with him in this very visceral way.
Stephen had a time clock in there, which
was the boiler down in the basement, which
was building and building and building,
and of course, at the end, blew up.
The boiler that eventually blows up,
that is a metaphor for what's going
on in Jack Torrance's head.
I was hired to direct Dolan's Cadillac.
The writer and I, we were going to have a call with Mr. King
and I was just vibrating, I was so excited.
And I said, what do you think I should say first?
I think I'm going to tell him how much I love The Shining.
And he said, I wouldn't do that, because he thinks
it's a total piece of shit.
It was very well known that Stephen King
did not like the Kubrick film.
And there are a number of reasons but one of the foremost
is that this was a really personal book to him.
It was a book he wrote while he was still drinking
about the guilt of a father who, while he's drunk,
has broken his beautiful little boy's arm.
It's about guilt and seeking redemption.
He goes to this location that is completely devoid of people
in the hopes that, that will help him
stay away from the bottle and be a responsible
husband and father.
And Kubrick turned it into something very different.
Now I was at the Chinese Theater
in Hollywood, first day, first show, to see The Shining
and pretty much everybody in that huge theater had
read the book, so we're all going all right,
Kubrick's doing this.
This is going to be great.
And they were booing and hissing and
everybody was like pissed off.
It wasn't the book.
The creative personalities of Stanley Kubrick and Stephen
King are very, very different.
King is a very warm and human and emotional writer
and Kubrick is a very cool and intellectualized filmmaker.
Scatman Crothers told me he would do 85 takes
of one shot over and over and over, and not
necessarily give any direction.
So his calculating manner is kind
of in contrast to the emotional warmth of what
King's stories are about.
In his entire body of work, which
is substantial and tremendously influential,
Kubrick was never an emotional filmmaker.
Oh, come on, what do you mean roll video?
Two seconds...
We're [muted] killing ourselves out here
and you've got to be ready.
I am too, I'm standing right by the door.
- Shall we play mood music? - No, I can't hear it.
But when you came out like this, you said you just...
because they say, wait a minute, and then
you say on the radio, go...
When you do it, you've got to look desperate, Shelley.
You're just wasting everybody's time now.
I can't even get this door open...
On the record, I got such a bollocking
because they said turn over and they said video rolling and all
that, and I got all ready and jumped up and down,
and then they said never mind.
Cut it.
He had one emotional scene.
One.
Out of all the movies.
And that was the very end of Paths of Glory, which
will move you to tears, but never
again did Stanley Kubrick try to get your emotions involved.
It was always... it's cinematically stunning,
but it was a very intellectual chess game...
him telling a story.
I think we should discuss Danny?
It's a really good Stanley Kubrick movie,
but it's a terrible Stephen King movie.
Danny!
The problem is Stanley Kubrick didn't believe
in the supernatural in any way, shape, or form
and the movie was dictated on that belief
so it works on his own logic perfectly.
It's just not Stephen King's logic.
Kubrick would call him up in the middle of the night
and ask things like, do you believe in God?
When I talked to Stephen King, I
asked him a lot of questions about The Shining
and the shooting of The Shining and he told me this anecdote.
He said that he was home sleeping, 2:00 in the morning
or something in Maine where he lives
and his telephone was ringing, and it was Stanley Kubrick.
And he said, hi, Stephen, it's Stanley.
Are you OK?
And Stephen King said, yeah, no it's 2:00 in the morning,
so I'm sleeping.
Oh yeah, sorry, I'm here in London, we're shooting away
and I just have one question for you
and Stephen King said, yeah, what is it?
And Kubrick said, does God exist?
Stephen King said, well, Stanley that's the very big question,
you know, that really depends on where you come from,
why you... it's a big discussion.
And Kubrick said, yeah, yeah, no, that's...
That's all. Thank you.
Thank you very much.
And he put down the phone.
When we meet Jack Torrance Nicholson character
in the film, he seems to be as mad from the first second
we meet him as he is in the last second we meet him.
His madness lacks an arc.
He seems to be quite unhinged from the very beginning.
David Cronenberg said to me once, right after The Shining
came out, that the reason The Shining doesn't work
is because they cast the ending.
Jack Nicholson's crazy from the beginning.
That works in Kubrick's world, but not in King's world.
Will then take the time to get back to where it was.
You understand?
I know a famous film critic says
that Nicholson's performance in The Shining
is both his best and his worst performance,
which is an interesting thing of putting it.
What you lose, I think, is, again, the thing that I think
is Stephen's great strength is the recognizable humanity
in all of these characters.
Why don't you start right now and get the fuck out of here?
And who could imagine those two
actually ever being married?
You lose the horror to me of someone
very familiar to you becoming so other.
That's... to me, that goes to my heart right now.
I imagine if my wife and I had... if suddenly
they seemed so different, how painful and difficult
that would be.
That wasn't in the movie at all.
Yet as time has gone on as, we've all seen,
it has become what...
it has become this iconic horror movie that based on that.
I guess King never liked what he did,
but it really was Kubrick's version of King.
He had to make it his own like most artists do.
It's always tough to make those adaptation
so everybody loves it.
Hollywood is a rough and tumble place.
They call it show business not show friendly.
And there's betrayal, and treachery, and disappointment,
and all kinds of things.
There's a great joke.
I think it was Ernest Hemingway who said when you make
a deal with Hollywood, what you must do
is drive to the Colorado River, stop on the bridge
halfway across between Arizona and California
and throw your novel across.
When they throw the money across,
then you put it in your car, and you drive back East.
You know, the movie went on to become iconic.
It's a huge success and everybody knows here's Johnny,
but Stephen King wanted the chance to do
something closer to his book.
And he himself wrote the screenplay,
and he asked me if I would do it.
Actually the first question was if Brian
De Palma turns this down, would you want to direct it?
Well, I don't know if it ever went to Brian De Palma
but he didn't make it. - Daddy!
He did.
Hi!
Heya, Danny boy.
Danny.
King asked me to because we had two very successful
experiences together.
I was very naive.
I thought yeah, I want to do the Stephen King version.
I was disappointed in the Kubrick version
because I had loved the book so much before I saw it.
So I thought, sure, why not?
Well, once people started hearing that there was
going to be a shining for television,
oh my god, for television?
How can that be any good?
And being directed by the guy who directed
Critters 2, how could that be any good?
Stanley Kubrick versus Mick Garris...
All the guest rooms, strong and...
But the script was wonderful.
And I thought, we're going to make
something on our own, something special, which we did.
It was an opportunity to just tell
the story of the book, which was very, very personal to King.
We ignored the Kubrick film.
There are times when you can't help it
like the here's Johnny scene.
You still have somebody breaking through the door in the
bathroom and attacking Wendy.
That's the place where it most resembles the Kubrick film.
There was another important differentiation too.
King was drinking when he wrote the book
and King was dry when he wrote the screenplay
for the miniseries.
My name is Hartwell, and I'm an alcoholic with a fondness
for tranquilizers.
Hi, my name is Jack...
So he was able to give it a new perspective
from outside of being someone who was abusing substances.
You won't be sorry.
I was talking to Steve on the phone one day.
I had called him just to say, how are you?
How's it going?
And he said, oh, I think I might be about to make the biggest
mistake of my life because I have this story
that I'm thinking of writing, and then
publishing it in six volumes.
And he told me the basic idea, this mentally challenged
black inmate who is in for apparently
murdering two little white girls who
turns out to be this miraculous instrument of God.
Your name is John Coffey?
Yes, sir boss.
It's his relationship with the guards.
He didn't think I'd be interested because it
was another prison thing.
And I said, you know, you're probably right,
but that sounds intriguing enough to me.
So the next thing I know is I get
the very first volume of the six sent to me by his agent.
I read it, and I did something I've
never done before or since which is I have to make this movie.
I don't even know what the rest of it is.
I don't even know how it ends, but this
is Stephen King at his best.
I just could tell.
I called his office in Maine and the person I spoke to said,
well he's not here.
He's in Colorado on Mick Garris' set of The Shining miniseries.
I did know Mick.
He and I were good friends by then.
We had, sort of, a small circle of friends in Los Angeles.
All of us involved in the movie business in some way or other.
Mick's very good friends with Greg Nicotero and Greg
is very good friends with this guy,
and that guy and Robert Rodriguez and Quentin
and so many of those guys.
This was back when I was single and working
like a crazy machine.
And I would... sometimes on a weekend,
I would have everybody come over and just invite... and just
had this huge table and put like 14 or 16 people
around the table and make this giant pot of spaghetti and meat
sauce, and we'd open bottles of wine
and we'd be there til 2:00 or 3:00 in the morning just
around the table just talking and laughing.
And the rare occasion that he's actually on the West Coast,
we did have Stephen King and George Romero
and Mick would be there quite a lot.
So I flew to Colorado, and I rented a car
and I drove up the mountain just like Jack Torrance
in the opening of The Shining and I arrived at The Stanley,
this incredible hotel.
That was the very hotel that gave
Stephen King the idea for The Shining in the first place.
I walked into their ballroom, and they were in the middle
of filming the big New Year's Eve scene,
and there were all these extras dressed as ghosts and ghouls
and Stephen King was up on the stage as the bandleader
and shaking his butt, and, you know, it was so
much fun to walk onto that set.
And of course, Mick is a dear friend, so it was
like a very welcoming arrival.
I really like having friends show up and do cameos,
and I didn't know that Frank had an ulterior motive,
but it's the only time in his life
Frank had ever shaved off his beard.
So he... I don't...
I didn't ask him to but he wanted to do it.
And so we had all these wonderful people there,
especially people within the genre
where the fans will see that's Frank Darabont
and you feel like you're part of a special club
because most people don't know who Frank
Darabont is but we do, right?
And Steve saw me and he said, what are you doing here?
And I said, I've come all this way to tell you
I really want to do The Green Mile.
He said, great, it's yours.
I said, fantastic, can I read the rest of it?
He said, no, you can't.
You have to wait just like everybody else.
And then that's when he also admitted
that he actually hadn't even written
the last volume or two of it.
I thought, what a bold, crazy, high wire act that is.
He's an extraordinary writer.
He's sort of like the Charles Dickens
of 20th and 21st century.
Literally writing these massive novels almost in episodes.
What a giant.
The Green Mile was his attempt to do Dickens, which
is to write an episodic novel where he could publish
a new chapter every week or whatever it was,
which is how Dickens came to write so many of his novels.
That was how they wrote in the 1800s,
and they were trying to make a living
and they were paid a penny a word or whatever it was.
But that was The Green Mile too.
The movie was set during the Depression at a time,
and certainly in a place where black people
were not respected at all.
Boy, you under arrest for murder.
That's what I thought was so interesting and powerful
about the theme of that story when I read it.
What does the Bible speak of?
It speaks of the least of these, the least will be the greatest.
You have a man who is not even really considered a man.
What if that person is actually a miracle of God?
What if that is the best of us?
And I find that so moving and so powerful.
And just the basic theme of don't
judge a book by its cover.
You don't judge a person by the color of their skin.
You don't judge a person by their status in life
or in society.
It's like what Martin Luther King said,
which is judge somebody by the content of their character,
not the color of their skin, not by surface things.
Judge them by their actions.
And I'm a big believer in that sort of thing.
I want it to be over and done with.
I do.
I'm tired, boss.
I'm tired of being on the road, lonely
as a sparrow in the rain.
I'm tired of never having me a buddy to be with,
or to tell me where we's going to, coming from or why.
Mostly I'm tired of people being ugly to each other.
My favorite memory of The Green Mile
is one of my favorite memories from directing period.
There's the scene in The Green Mile where Paul, Tom Hanks,
comes into the cell with John Coffey
and they've now realized that he is A, innocent of the crime,
and B, that he is this miracle of God.
It's the scene that I got Michael the nomination, right?
Shooting that scene, this is an example
of what a generous actor Tom Hanks is
and the wisdom of a truly generous actor
because since Michael was the least experienced actor
on the set when we began, I would usually start shooting
a scene with him first because he would generally
get there within a few takes.
The same with every actor.
They usually have their sweet spot, whether it takes 1, to 3,
takes 5 to 6 or whatever.
As a director, you've got to just make a note of that
and make sure you don't wear them out
by the time they're on camera.
And Tom was always very gracious about that
and movie stars aren't always.
They usually want to start on them,
but he was very cool about me starting on Michael.
I remember we started the same way all on Michael and Tom
was off camera, but he wasn't just giving him the lines.
He was acting his heart out for Michael.
I was starting to get nervous, thinking, I hope Tom still has
some gas left in the tank by the time I turn around
and get the cameras on him because he's winning an Academy
Award here off camera, but he knew to get the performance
that Michael needed to give, he had to give Michael everything
as his scene partner.
And that wisdom and that generosity, the risk
of not having enough left for yourself,
but giving it all to the other actor, so that,
that actor can shine, that's the kind of generosity
that Tom has.
It's certainly nothing we discussed.
It's certainly... he just did it.
He just knew he had to do it for Michael.
He had to be fully there 100%.
Tom was always on the set, and he being the movie star,
we would try to be conscious of the fact that it's Friday
night, you have your weekend coming up,
I can let you go, but he's... well, no,
we're still doing the scene.
Like yeah, but I've got all your stuff already.
I've shot you.
We can have someone stand in for you.
Oh, no, no, no, no, he has to be there for the other actors.
So Tom would be there sometimes till 2 o'clock
in the morning on a Friday.
We're now eating into his weekend.
He didn't care.
He had to be there for the other actors, even off camera.
Do you know how many times I've been off camera
in all the movies I'm in?
Thousands.
Tom was one of my choices for Andy in Shawshank.
He couldn't consider it because he was doing Forrest Gump.
Things turned out great regardless because Tim Robbins
is brilliant, and so is Morgan Freeman so any other thoughts
we had don't matter.
We got the right guys for that.
But because of Shawshank and because of the way
the movie turned out, Tom approached me and said,
wow, I love the movies you make.
If you ever want me to read anything, let me know.
So the very next thing was The Green Mile
so I sent it straight to Tom and he read it and said,
great, let's do it.
And it was the easiest yes I ever got from an actor
and he was actually I would say probably the easiest person
to work with in my career.
Michael, Clarke Duncan.
- Thanks for your time. - All right.
I came home one day, I clicked the messages,
and there's Bruce Willis on my answering machine saying, hey,
I hear you're doing this movie. I've read the book.
I really love the book.
You should read Michael Clarke Duncan, a guy
I'm working with on Armageddon.
He's your guy.
I'm like, OK, Bruce, I'll give him a try.
I'll have him in to read.
His first audition for me, you thought, no way.
No way.
And then he became the only way.
Bruce was right, as it turns out,
and I've never heard from Bruce Willis since.
This is the only time...
this is one of those weird surreal moments
you have sometimes in our business where you go,
there's Bruce Willis on my answering machine.
That's kind of great.
That's kind of cool.
It's pretty funny, but no, he was right.
Michael was the guy.
We had the little girl bodies that we had made.
The dummies were sculpted to make John Coffey look larger.
He was very tall actor to begin with,
but we sort of scaled them down a little bit.
And for some reason or another, the first time they filmed it,
the dummies weren't positioned in the way
that they were sculpted.
We were editing the movie and Frank had said there's just one
thing that I want to take a second stab at
and we rebuilt the dummies of the two little girls,
and we reshot it on the backlot at Warner studios.
And it made a world of difference.
People don't realize what it takes
to make a movie and every single element,
you have to make a decision.
Do you like that belt?
What about the color of that shirt?
How does the sun look?
Do we want this in the background?
And you have to have an answer for every one
of those questions and you get hit
as the director from the second you step on set
to the second you go home.
I'm in heaven
and my heart beats so that I can hardly speak.
And I seem to find the happiness I SEEK When we're out together
dancing cheek to cheek.
There was something about the musicals
that Hollywood was making during the Depression
when the circumstances of real life were so dire,
but the musicals were this glossy sort
of unattainable like heaven vision.
And that particular number has always struck me
in such a delightful way because it's Fred Astaire and Ginger
Rogers, they're the most iconic musical performers
and dancers of that era.
And they are singing about heaven.
It just felt like the right anchor
for the movie and Steve's story, it
was killer's kiss, the Richard Widmark
playing some crazy killer.
That made our main character, Paul, think
of the events of long ago because that character
reminded him of Percy.
It didn't feel like quite the right thing to me.
I wanted the contrast, I think, between the reality
of that time versus the dream reality
that Hollywood was telling us.
And I wanted it to remind him of John Coffey
and not of Percy when he was watching that clip
and being transported by something
he'd never seen before.
And they're singing about being in heaven.
I thought, OK that seems really right to me.
I couldn't quite picture the scene with John Coffey watching
Richard Widmark pushing some lady down the stairs
in a wheelchair and giggling because he's murdered her
and like, I didn't see that having
a great effect on John Coffey.
That's one of those things that when you're translating
from one language to another language,
from written storytelling to cinema
storytelling that evolve along the way,
that change along the way.
It's like what do I want the audience to feel when
they're watching this scene?
Frank and I have been friends for decades
and when it came time to shoot The Green Mile,
we knew that the big moment would
be Del's, death and the electrocution in the chair.
And we worked with Darrell Pritchett who was the special
effects coordinator, and we knew that first and foremost,
whatever we built, whatever this puppet
that was going to be built needed
to move 100% realistically.
So we had Michael Jeter, the actor,
come to our studio in the chair, and we filmed his movements.
We filmed how he would move and how he would react,
and we sort of reverse engineered the puppet
to match what the actor had done,
which traditionally, you don't usually do it that way.
The puppet... you just kind of... the puppet
does what it's going to do and what it's built to do.
But in that particular instance, it was really, really important
that it felt 100% real.
Michael came to the studio.
We recorded all of his movements,
and then at that point, we did a body cast of him.
We built a fiberglass body the puppeteer rods and controls
and cables went out the bottom of the chair
and through the back wall.
So when we were shooting the scene,
all the puppeteers were behind the wall.
So we couldn't see anything, because we
weren't in the room with Tom Hanks and all the other actors.
We were on the other side of the wall
so we had a little monitor there.
Steve was there when we shot that sequence.
We have Stephen King visiting the set of The Green Mile.
How are you doing?
How are you?
OK.
Fabulous.
Is this the mile the way you pictured it?
Yeah.
Sure it is.
Well, we're about... we're about to roll.
- OK. - Watch the magic.
Cut.
Frank, you maniac.
We're definitely going to...
There is no better man.
That's great.
Let me show you... let me show you all Sparky, man.
And we fried the bastard.
Yeah, I don't blame you.
I would.
Check this out, man.
Is this ever cranky.
Look at this.
Check it out.
And then we strap the ankles.
Kind of be sort of like a Houdini thing
if you could pull it off.
And that's exactly it.
Exactly.
This is a good look for you.
It's a good look for me.
Yeah.
Frank, could I get out now?
Stephen King showed up on the set.
It was his birthday.
We brought out a cake, we all sang happy birthday to him.
We do have a secret evil plan for Stephen King.
Since last Monday was his birthday,
we're going to spring a birthday cake on him.
Oh, god.
You like me.
You really, really like me.
We pulled it off.
Success.
I think we really surprised him.
Eduard Delacroix you are history.
Everybody sang happy birthday in the theater.
God bless you.
Thank you.
Frank, when's your birthday?
January 28th.
Good.
Be prepared.
People so excited to have him there.
- Give my best to everybody. - All right.
Take care.
Bye, bye.
Bye, everybody.
Bye, Steve.
Gosh, it could have all been taken away.
In something eerily familiar from his book,
Stephen King was hit by a truck as he
walked along an empty road.
He's in Maine.
He's walking his dog and then typical Stephen
King, tragedy strikes.
He's in this horrible accident.
We were all afraid after that accident
that, that was going to be it.
It's miraculous that he came out of it alive,
and now fully ambulatory.
That's just amazing to me.
So thanking God for that.
That whole accident is actually very much
connected to The Green Mile.
When we had our big premiere screening in Westwood,
it was the first time Stephen King had made an appearance
in public since his accident and in a lot of pain
still, you know, but he was very invested
emotionally in the movie, and he really wanted to be there.
He really wanted to see it.
So that was his first time out after that.
Appliance that holds the pins,
that hold the bones together.
On a home shopping network now,
operators are standing by, use Tudi.
Humor and drugs, the two things together.
And bitching.
A lot of bitching off camera.
Yeah, big time.
King is a believer.
Steve had often talked about life
goes on after the story ends.
I am not a religious person by any stretch of the imagination,
but religion and belief are not the same thing.
Religion is often used to control not to give comfort.
Praise God!
Praise the Lord!
King does touch and use politics,
social issues, cultural issues, and religion
in a lot of his work.
It's woven through.
It's one of his elements, I guess we could call it, motifs.
Children of the Corn was no different.
When I saw the script, I realized that this script is
based on a exploration of dogma, how people follow other people,
how cults work, why belief systems are what they are
and how people manipulate others.
It's really ingrained in American culture,
even if we're not religious, we've grown up
with religion from childhood.
Most kids go to church in their early years,
and maybe they grow out of it, or maybe
they never go, but it's something
that's always around you.
In the late 1980s, my parents who were Methodist
at that time, became Southern Baptists, and all of a sudden,
a lot of the things that I had loved were off limits.
For that intense dddd of time, I sort of lived in Fahrenheit 451
in my house.
I had to hide Stephen King books under my bed in the box springs
under my bed, and they did at one time
find kind of my stash of Stephen King books under the bed
and they burned them in our fireplace.
I wrote Stephen King a letter that my books had been burned.
I just put Stephen King, Bangor, Maine
and I sent him the first three dark tower books.
I had read that if you sent Stephen King a book,
he'd sign it for you. I didn't expect anything.
I wasn't even sure it would get there, but a couple of weeks
later, I came home from the private Christian school
that I went to every day.
My dad pulled me aside, and he was like, Josh,
there's a box here from Stephen King.
I didn't tell your mom.
King had written me this beautiful message, kind of,
in the front cover of each of the books.
And it was a continuing letter, so you'd start reading one,
and then the next one would pick up.
I couldn't imagine that my mom was burning
The Stand in our fireplace because it's
the most Christian book he's ever written.
I was raised by people who believed
the Antichrist was coming at some point,
that the rapture was going to happen.
Stephen King gave me a counter myth
that allowed me to look at some of this stuff
in a different way.
I'm seeing a lot of army traffic
on state 17 westbound in the direction of Arnett.
You heard anything about that?
Just you let the army mind their business
and you mind yours unit 16.
Goodbye.
Politics is something that King doesn't shy away from
and neither do I. The whole military industrial complex.
The military thinks they're right,
and they can do whatever the hell they want to do.
Well, that's not why they're there.
They're there for protecting us, not controlling us.
The idea that civilization and society is a very fragile
construct, and it can fall apart at the drop of a hat
is very appealing to me, because if you
are a student of history, you can
see that, that has happened many, many times
in many, many ways.
Entire nations can go insane and everything that we depend upon,
especially more and more it's so very technological
that if you pull the rug out from under us,
we revert to a very primitive state.
You don't seem to understand the situation here, ma'am.
Martial law has been declared.
We don't have to put up with you and your pinko friends anymore.
Mike, are you getting all this?
Get him!
Get the driver!
You know, The Stand shines a light
on what America is as a nation.
When all the societal norms break down, who are they?
Yeats was right.
Things fall apart.
And here we are at this moment seeing societal norms
break down and it's not pretty.
It's terrifying.
Bring out your dead.
The monster is coming.
He's coming.
Bring out your dead.
Just the idea of what would you
do if like everyone was dead and there was
just this handful of people?
I hadn't seen many stories like that.
Now it seems like maybe every story is about that,
but back then, seeing The Stand mini series, that
was the first time I thought, oh my god, imagine if I survived
something like that, and you could go into a supermarket
and no one was there, and there's
a town and everyone's dead.
Like, it was just so mind blowing to me as a little kid.
I really didn't want to do The Stand
again linear because mix series meant
so much to me when I was a kid.
I don't know what reason there is to make that again.
We had to do some things too just
to make it more representative of all of America
because if everybody in the world died,
you don't just want to see a poster
with a bunch of white people and one old black Lady.
Because in the book, it is... everybody's white
except for mother Abigail.
It was written 40 years ago before I was even born.
So we really did try to do what we could
to make it be if the world ended,
this is a cross-section of all the people.
And then just trying to structure it in a way
that would be surprising to people who were really
familiar with the material, who had
seen the series many times when they were young
or read the book.
We wanted to make sure that even if you'd read the book,
you never would quite know where it was
going to go next and all that.
The irony of that was not lost upon us.
While we were shooting, we were at the very last day shut
down by the COVID pandemic.
And of course, The Stand begins with
a global pandemic that kills 90% of the population of the world.
So it was truly unnerving while we were shooting, seeing
how the disease was spreading.
It was strange.
It was surreal, and it's still surreal now.
But I mean, yes, we absolutely were making
a show about what is happening in the world,
and that was weird.
That man has had a crystal ball for a very
long time on his desk.
Just like show me the future.
That's the legend of Stephen King.
He's able to see things in the future
that the average person can't.
And then also the fact that Randall Flagg,
the villain of The Stand, has uncomfortable echoes
of Donald Trump.
We drown the rats, and then we burn the witch.
In the way that he appeals to the worst
of the American character and is a kind of populist leader
in a world in crisis.
I really felt, when we were making that mini series,
we were holding up a mirror to the world.
And when you consider that Stephen King wrote that book
sometime in the late '70s, you, kind of, have to think
he's a bit of a prophet.
I think it's that aspect of his work
that I like the most is this deep, sort of,
resonant understanding of what the moment are
that we're living in.
And in some ways the cell had some reflections of that.
There were things in the book that I felt were prophetic.
The signal isn't something that might happen tomorrow.
It happened already.
This isn't like it's coming.
This is about what's here.
Even in the last image of the film,
there's the initials of Donald Trump.
Donald Trump was not on the landscape at that time.
He's a prophet of the apocalypse.
So you saw all this shit coming?
Craig Stillson in The Dead Zone are just chilling.
What he saw coming was unfortunately, precisely
accurate, and here we are.
Bastard!
You're not the voice of the people
I am the voice of the people.
The people speak through me, not you.
Came to me while I slept, Sonny.
My destiny.
In the middle of the night, it came to me.
I must get up now, right now and fulfill my destiny.
The Dead Zone remains my favorite of all his King's
movies because Christopher Walken's character, the love
story, all that wove through that thing
was just incredible to me.
It really, really captured it.
When HBO started on television here, they had five movies,
and they would play them over and over again.
So I watched the dead zone probably 100 times.
And I just think it's one of the great love
stories, one of the great performances
by Christopher Walken.
It's such a terrific film.
like to use this as a shortcut to school.
And I came to really feel like Stephen
King, in a way like Bob Dylan, is
a sort of dreamer of America.
Like he contains the entirety of it
and sort of dreams in the language
of the chaos of America.
People, when you apply fear, turn against one another.
Paranoia, suspicion, aggression suddenly happens.
The veneer of polite civilization
gets ripped away very quickly.
It is his fault. Yes, it is...
No!
We're dealing with a lot of craziness these days,
and it's actually only been getting
worse since I made The Mist.
People trying to control an environment
and trying to control a population
and here it's done in a very claustrophobic sense.
Everybody is trapped together in this one store that's
being invaded by monsters.
So politics has to go out the window at one point,
and it's got the grimmest ending ever,
and it's an ending that Darabont came up with.
Frank would always send me an early draft of the script.
Let me know what you think.
He had done it with Shawshank.
He'd done it with Green Mile.
He'd done it with Majestic.
All of his movies, he always send me one.
And he sent me The Mist and I read the script,
and it got to the end, and I threw
the script across the room, and I called Frank.
I'm like, dude, really?
Stephen's a genius when it comes
to putting you in the skin of those characters.
And then when I got to the end of the story, I went, what?
There's no ending?
It was a very ambiguous kind of non-ending
and I thought, well, OK, that's fine.
He's taken me on this incredible journey as a writer,
as a storyteller, fair enough.
If he doesn't have a conclusive ending, that's OK.
But I thought if it's a movie, I don't
think that's an ending that's going to be very satisfactory.
I don't think it's going to really land well.
Movies, I think, need an ending.
When I wrote the script, I sent it to Stephen King
and my note was, Steve, I gave it an ending,
and it's definitely a left turn and I'm leaving this up to you.
The irony is when we went to the premiere in New York,
Steve basically said, I wish I would have thought of that
ending for the book because if I would have thought of that,
that's how I would have ended the story.
It's a unique situation where the writer looks
at the body of work of what that movie was
and where Frank took it and was like dang,
I wish I would have thought of that.
That's pretty great.
And I feel like The Mist lives in the same world
as John Carpenter's The Thing where the movie came
out right after ET and people had a very
unique reaction to The Thing.
And then the movie has come to be very well respected.
I think The Mist is the same way.
Upon multiple viewings, and as that movie ages,
it's like wine.
I think people really respect it and understand it and get
a much better sense of it.
Just like being home in LA.
Yeah!
And tug of war!
When I read The Mist, Steve's story,
I thought oh, this is really cool.
This is very weird pressure cooker happening.
You take all that and put it into the microcosm
of a supermarket as Steve King did
and you can hold that mirror up to the audience
and say boy, look at this.
This is kind of ugly.
And I love when stories can do that.
I love when a piece of cinema holds that mirror up,
whether it's something truly glorious like Schindler's List,
which I think is just about the greatest movie ever made
or the Night of the Living Dead on the opposite end
of the budget spectrum, that also had a very
sociological component to it.
I don' think they even intended it
but it showed up in the movie, and that's
one of the reasons the movie is so powerful, and so beloved.
I mean... well, we could talk about movies that I love
for days, but Night of the Living Dead, that
was in the '60s and the 1960s when we were having the Civil
Rights struggle, which we seem to be reliving now,
which is really crazy.
You would think that we would have grown up more by now,
but apparently we don't learn from the past.
I believe in 1968 was when that movie came out.
The Civil Rights struggle was going on,
and the lead of the movie was a black man
who was not shy about standing up for himself.
It is tough for the kid that her old man is so stupid.
Now, you get the hell down in the cellar.
You can be the boss down there.
I'm boss up here.
To see a black guy slap the white guy around on screen back
then was sociologically earth shattering.
It was amazing.
It was like Sidney Poitier in The Heat of the Night.
If you really understand what was going on in the United
States at the time that Night of the Living Dead came out,
you'll realize what a bold movie that really was.
George Romero came from a documentary style background.
They made Night of the Living Dead for literally no money.
At the time, a lot of the directors
really had this unique sort of Renegade spirit.
Between George and Tobe Hooper and Wes Craven,
a lot of the filmmakers at the time, horror
was very, very taboo.
George always would claim that he
never really was trying to make a statement, but he always did.
He was able to shine the spotlight on specific elements
of what was relevant during the day
without ever even realizing, I think, that he had done it.
He cast Dawand Jones, an African-American man,
and George would always say, oh, he just
was the best actor which is probably the case but
whether or not George meant it, I always felt that maybe
in the back of his mind that there was something there
because then from all of his other subsequent movies
from that point on, there was a strong African-American lead
and a female.
George liked pushing the boundaries
and I think that's where he had a kindred spirit
with Steve King.
He and Stephen met.
Steve being a fan of George's, wanted to meet George.
I think it may have been during Dawn of the Dead
that Steve and George struck up a friendship,
and that carried through into Knight
Riders and Knight Riders, Stephen King has a cameo.
That's all.
They're like like the wrestlers on TV.
You got the blood bag.
And I believe that it was during Knight Riders
that they started talking about EC Comics
and like wanting to do a movie together
and it ended up being Creepshow.
Hey, buddy.
What the fuck happened?
Looks like a hit and run.
Yeah?
It's like a Black guy, huh?
The number one most important thing about Creepshow
is every story had a different tone.
One of them was funny.
The Jordy Verrill story that Steve starred in
was very silly and very outrageous.
And then you had the Crate which was a straight horror.
And then you had things like Father's Day.
I got my cake.
Every single story was different.
So that was one of the main things
that I took away from Creepshow when I was younger
and what I wanted to instill in the current iteration
of Creepshow which is you're going on a different journey
every single time and it might be fun, it might be scary,
it might be suspenseful, it might be tense,
it might be ridiculous.
But no matter what, every experience that
you go on in the show, you're getting
a different vibe from it.
If there was one of those stories that
really had a major impact, it was probably
They're Creeping Up on You.
To live with cockroaches for four or five weeks,
was a life changing experience.
We would find them on us all the time no matter
how much we tried to wrap ourselves up
and not take them home with us.
The roach wranglers... that's what we called them,
roach wranglers... promised us that they could actually
control the behavior of the roaches
with certain Skinnerian or Pavlovian tricks.
It's like no.
A roach does not take direction, right?
So we had the big dump.
We had to dump all the roaches and they
would scatter everywhere.
And if you've seen the movie, you know that it's when
E.G. Marshall finally gets his.
So they said, well, how are we going to prevent them
from getting out of here because the set lights and no ceiling?
Oh, no, don't worry about it.
What we'll do is we'll put Vaseline all around the top
of the set so that when they scatter,
because they hate light, they'll go up the walls,
they'll hit the Vaseline, and they'll fall back down.
OK.
We'll take your word for it.
So the day comes, Vaseline all around the top of the set,
dump the roaches into the set and off they go right up
the wall over the Vaseline and out into the rest of the world.
The Vaseline didn't work.
I don't know how I came up with it.
There are times when I wish I hadn't like now.
I'm sure some people in the surrounding area
woke up with certain roaches that they'd never seen before.
These were big fat Trinidadian roaches,
and I think there are a few new species in Western Pennsylvania
now.
It was an accident.
A legitimate accident.
So why should I fuck up my life right?
How are you doing lady?
Thanks for the ride.
One of the things that both Steve and George had
is the ability to mix the humor with the horror.
Now of course Creepshow is the perfect example of that.
That was kind of the beginning of their working relationship,
and it was a very unique one because King trusted George.
He trusted him implicitly, and that
was something that back in the day was very hard to come by.
So George was set to direct Pet Sematary at one point,
and then of course, George did the Dark Half
an he's collaborated with Stephen King probably
as many times as Rob Reiner or Frank Darabont
they had really very successful collaborations.
But George always was ahead of his time
very much like Steve's writing was.
I think everybody loves to be scared.
I think it's a way of working things out.
I mean, after all, horror is as ancient as human beings.
In all storytelling and all cultures,
there is horror story.
Fairy tales were a way for people to teach their children
about the real world, but I think
a good horror movie allows us to put some order to the chaos.
I'm interested in fear because all my life
I've been a fearful person.
I've wasted so much of my life being
afraid of imaginary things.
Afraid of not going to get that job, afraid I'll lose the job I
have, afraid that I'm not going to meet the girl
I love or she's going to leave me once I do find her.
All those fears, none of them has ever come true in my life,
but I had them anyway.
So I felt that's a really interesting topic.
And that's what this story in Cujo
gives me an opportunity to tell.
The dog becomes the metaphor for the insanity that fear people.
You know, obviously, a lot of it's about mortality.
A lot of it's about death.
A lot of it's about questions of existence and meaning.
So undercover of almost silliness,
you can tangle with some pretty deep existential questions,
I think.
It's one of the reasons, I think,
horror is super interesting.
I mean, on the one hand, he's just incredibly creative
and has great concepts.
He can take something like a killer car
and make it a very scary story.
But I think the thing that's scarier about something
like Christine is the journey that Arnie
Cunningham is going through.
You care more about that car than you care about me.
Where really the car is just a metaphor for the change.
He's going through being bullied in high school
and, kind of, being an outcast and then
trying to find his voice.
And I would say that's the thing, for me, that makes
his work, so memorable, that these stories don't leave
my brain is because the people in them
and the journeys they go through is always,
for me, more visceral and stronger.
For me, that is always more powerful than even
like supernatural aspects of it.
Decided to wake up and see what home looks like, huh?
In our opinion, Pet Sematary is one of the scariest things
he's ever done.
Ellie be careful.
Ellie.
Daddy!
He himself wrote the book and then
was so disturbed by what he did, he put it in a drawer
for like a year.
He knew he tapped into something because he
had kids at that time.
You got it.
Gage is flying it.
You got it?
Can I fly it now?
In a minute, honey...
And I have a son now.
And so to me the thought of anything happening to him
is the scariest thing I could possibly imagine.
Don't let him go on the road, Louise!
Get him, Louis!
Get the baby!
More heart rendering than parents who want
to bring their dead child back.
I should never have shown you that place.
Your child is not the only thing that will come back.
One of the great themes of horror,
be careful what you wish for.
Did you weigh yourself?
297.
Billy, you were 297 last week.
It'll take some time for these diets to work.
For Billy Hallock, life is sweet.
I thought Thinner was a terrific character study.
I thought it was elevated from being pure horror.
I thought there was something very human and very universal
about a fat man who wanted desperately to lose weight
and finally had his wish answered.
It's a universal theme.
If everybody isn't trying to lose weight,
they know somebody who is.
Nobody is ever too thin or too rich.
I cast Stephen in it, and he was very good actually.
And he was sitting on set waiting to be called
and he was reading the Bangor newspaper.
And I looked over his shoulder to see what he was reading
and Stephen King was reading the obituaries
and which I thought was very telling.
I think you'd better come along with me, Reverend.
King is always after deeper things.
He's willing to look into the darkness
completely and allow what emerges
and he's not interested in shutting anything out.
It's an ass kicker, isn't it?
Is that for me?
I found some of those original scripts
that he wrote for movies back then that people, sort
of, crapped on at the time.
I think Silver Bullet's actually really beautiful
and is a really great love story about a brother and a sister
and a family and one of the best uncles you could ever meet.
And a kid who's in a really interesting situation where he
gave him almost a superpower.
He gave an identity and a voice to people who had problems
that most fiction would never touch,
for people with disabilities, for people
with mental health issues.
I just think all that stuff, he's been so brilliant at.
And some people look back now, and it
might be dated but he broke new ground really in a lot of ways.
He did it over the whole course of his career
from African-Americans back then who would never
be featured in a book in that way where he had balls
and he did it.
He has empathy for everyone.
What I interpreted the film to be about is about woundedness.
We all as human beings carry some sort of wound.
What we are called upon to do is to accept life, to embrace it
and to go forward.
And Corey just was a kid who just seemed
like nothing could bother.
So I thought the werewolf was a beautiful metaphor for what
human beings can become if they can't
embrace their full nature.
But it's not my fault!
The reverend, he had lustful impulses, for example.
Instead of being able to accept them,
he suppressed them so far below the surface
that they came out in these monstrous ways.
Every single time Stephen King created characters
that I could relate to.
He taps into his subconscious and gets a truth that are not
necessarily apparent to everybody
else, about where we are as a country and a culture.
Stephen King has such an incalculable reach
on popular culture in ways that I don't think
can ever be measured.
He's the guy who married American pop culture to horror.
Great stories translate from page to celluloid
and there's so many references.
Everywhere you look there's Stephen King references.
Have gun will travel reads the card of a man.
I've heard people refer to big dogs as Cujo.
Down, Cujo.
So it's fun to have worked on a film, the title of which
has entered the language as big dangerous dog.
He's been such a mirror for pop culture,
but now he is his own pop culture.
Stephen King helped define so many of what
now are cliches and tropes of the cinematic world.
You see it parodied even.
That's when you, kind of, know you've done something special
whether in literature or in filmmaking or both
in this case with Stephen King and adaptations.
Oh, come on.
Films like Shawshank Redemption, that classic
narration by Morgan Freeman.
It is used as a trope now, as a cliche.
It did feel like a prison, and that meant only one thing made
sense conceptually, we had to break out
and someone with the gravitas of Morgan Freeman
had to narrate it.
The same thing can be said for The Shining.
Like that film in itself is now like almost
in its entirety as a trope.
I had a couple of people that actually worked on The Shining
working 1408 and both films being about writers in hotel
rooms and so on, which was to me kind of cool and inspiring
being at the same studio where the great Kubrick shot
this great movie.
In the end of the film, the hotel room is on fire.
The fire guys is coming to break down the door
and to get Ensline out of the room.
And the prop guy came up to me just before we shot the scene
and said I worked on The Shining as well.
And, this is actually the ax that we used in The Shining.
The famous ax that Jack Nicholson
have when he breaks down the door.
And I was thinking maybe you want to use it for this scene,
and I was like fantastic, absolutely.
So I gave the ax to the fire guy who breaks down the door
and helps out Enslin from the hotel room.
And nobody knows that obviously.
Now you know it but it's a secret,
but that's Nicholson's ax, and to me, that was a cool detail.
You can see The Shining in just
about every successful horror film made in the last 25 years.
And sometimes in the tiniest little ways.
But I think we filmmakers want to express our love
for that material and so it feeds itself,
and then that becomes this kind of self-perpetuating cycle
of references, homage and celebration.
When I read Doctor Sleep as a fan of Kubrick
and as a fan of King, I was fascinated by the tug of war
that was happening internally.
I'm reading this great story, but all of the visual language
in my brain is Kubrick's.
It just is.
Danny!
Danny boy!
No, doc.
You can put things from the overlook
away in boxes, but not memories.
Never those.
They are the real ghosts.
I had a fateful meeting with John Berg at Warner Brothers
and he was a Stephen King fan and I
had just finished Gerald's Game and no one had seen it yet.
And he asked how it went and he was like, that's a crazy one.
Hard one to crack.
And I said, yep, it was really it was really difficult
but I think we might have done it.
And he said, we have one that's really hard to crack.
Have you ever read Doctor Sleep?
And I was like, yes.
And he said out of curiosity, what would you recommend?
And the pitch I gave him was...
I was like I think what you do is you stay as
close to the book as you can for the first two thirds
but you have to assume that story
takes place in the established Kubrick cinematic universe.
It's too well known.
It's too iconic.
If you try to come off of it, it'll backfire.
Mike Flanagan really had to walk the tightrope because he
knew that King was not a fan of the Kubrick film,
but he also knew that most audiences
know The Shining from the Kubrick film
and not from the book.
What if you could take Stephen King's Shining and Stanley
Kubrick's Shining and what if you could just kind of Parent
Trap them back together?
Is it possible?
I decided, going into it, that if King
didn't like anything that was up to,
that I wouldn't do the movie.
His initial answer to the idea of using the Kubrick canon
was no.
He didn't want to do it, but wanted to have
a creative conversation.
The pitch that I made was all about one scene.
I said, if you can just imagine Dan goes back
into the condemned overlook and it's all dormant,
it's all asleep, and he has to wake it up
and he makes it to the gold room, and at the bar
is a glass waiting for him, because Dan is eight
years sober at that point.
There's a man in the familiar Kubrick red tuxedo pouring
the whiskey for Dan and imagine that, that man is his father,
and the two of them have a conversation about alcohol.
That was what turned him around.
This is the medicine.
So tell me, pup, are you going to take your medicine?
I'm not.
Adaptation is complicated, because very
bold choices have to be made.
There's no way you can translate 600 pages of a book
into a screenplay and keep everything.
Rewrite Stephen King, it really doesn't make
sense when you think about it.
Why do a Stephen King movie and not
to have Stephen King's story?
Why buy a book if you're not going to follow it?
It's always about what you don't do, what you can't do.
You have to have a strategy about what
you're not going to do.
So I come to it as a reader, and I
want to recreate the experience that the reader
has, the emotional experience, not the plot detail.
Stephen had a very cool phrase when people would
say, well, what do you think of what
they've done to your books?
And he'd say, well, what do you mean what have
they done to you to my books?
Well, look at the bookshelf.
My books are all there.
Nobody's done anything to my books.
So I think he has a really great attitude about how
his books are adapted.
A novel is not a film.
It isn't.
Sometimes it's working with the dialogue in the head
or narration or all the things.
You've got to make a film that an audience can look at, find
themselves in and at the same time,
be true to the original story.
That calls for the actual term adaptation.
And I think that you have to be bold in the sense of staying
true to material, but also being bold about adapting it
so that it fits on the screen not on the page.
Movies are what you see and what you hear,
but as Hitchcock said, they're called moving pictures,
not talking pictures.
Movies are still a visual medium.
Writing a screenplay is a very interesting process.
It's half mechanics and half poetry.
When you're adapting a great author,
if the story is excellent, what you're trying to do
is capture the essence of it, if you're changing certain facts
and you moving the plugs around and sawing
the wood a little bit differently,
it still feels like they experienced
the same emotions and the same story by the end of it.
Everybody has their own way to approach material,
but it doesn't matter whether it's Stephen King or not,
but the thing about Stephen King it usually works
really well for the screen.
The reason any filmmaker wants to adapt Stephen King
is the material is so good.
He's all about character, all about story
and where he keeps coming up with these, I have no idea.
The man is so prolific.
I can't believe how much he's written, how much he's produced
and how good it is.
I don't know where that comes from.
Nobody does otherwise they'd bottle it up and sell it.
He believes that these stories already exist.
They're already out there, and he
says it all the time because people think he's joking.
He's not joking.
This is what he believes that the stories are just out there
and he's just like an archaeologist just digging
around until he finds something, and then
he just starts excavating it, extracting it and pulling
from it and revealing it.
Michelangelo the great sculptor he
said something extremely similar that every block of marble
has the masterpiece in it.
He takes a big idea, and he turns it and he turns it,
and he turns it, and that's why the book keeps going and going
and going because he keeps taking this one idea,
and he doesn't stick with what it meant on chapter 1.
Stephen also has a great look which helps.
To look like who you are.
I think that he looks like who he is and a lot.
So the second you see him, he could only be him.
It's a very admirable quality, I think,
to look like who you are.
I wouldn't go out there if I were you.
I think I'll be all right.
Told you.
They never listen.
But of course, It Chapter Two, Doctor Sleep, The Stand.
The Outsider on HBO starts in January.
And then you're working on something with J.J. Abrams too.
No, wait, I'm not done.
I would guess that he's as shocked as everybody
else about this resurgence.
Mr. Mercedes starts tonight on DirecTV.
I'm not really sure what happened,
but there we were just smack bang
in the middle of the... as I call it, the King nascent.
Like it was an explosion and then the rest is history.
Suddenly every studio that had a Stephen
King property sitting on their shelf,
they wanted to get it made.
We sort of like tentatively raised our hand.
A movie that we would have done for free.
It was just something indelible in our childhood.
Some of the series have been inspired by his work.
Stranger Things, which kind of sounds like Needful Things.
Certainly you have to give Stephen a big nod of thanks
for, sort of, inventing the weird
'80s supernatural adventure story that often stars kids.
The way digital technology has improved over the last decade
has made it easier and easier for people
to realize, in a fairly realistic way, some
of the more spectacular things that Stephen
King has been writing about.
I love that he'll go out and do anything.
As I said, you could give him an orange
and he could write a novel about it.
He wrote about the Kennedy assassination
and time travel and basically anything he wants to.
He's a writer that knows no bounds.
Cable and streaming have really helped that along.
TV matured to the point where TV can be novelistic.
Sitting down in front of the television
and being able to watch 10 or 12 hours of a great story.
It's wonderful.
It didn't exist not that long ago.
I think the other reason that he's timeless is because he's
also completely contemporary.
He's not a novelist who takes 10 years to write a book.
He's writing, he's writing, he's writing, he's writing,
and speed, I think, gives him this...
he's alive in the moment.
Different generation of directors
and different approaches but still the essence of Stephen
King's work is in there.
He shows us a mirror of where we are as people.
And even though the symptoms of how we behave change
as the ages change and the years go by,
he keeps his basic humanity in his stories.
His stuff doesn't really age.
Like he was writing about the darkness that
lurks in the heart of America, and that darkness
sadly has not dissipated.
His stories are about the human condition.
So it doesn't matter whether you're my age,
those themes resonate and every generation
can find those themes.
And within that we find deep truths
that we didn't see before that are
things we need to know about what's happening right now.
I think that's his genius.
Stephen King is just one of the rare careers I don't think
anyone's going to ever come along
again that has this kind of body of work and still continue.
I think he's like a clown car.
This is your 61st book.
Do you have a target number of books you're going for?
Is there a certain point at which you will stop?
Is retirement in any way an option for you?
God will tell me when to retire.
He'll say get out of the game, hang up your jock, you're done.