Original subtitles

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.

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.

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!

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!

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.