Stephen King

Interview By: Michael Dance
michaelmdance@gmail.com

When Stephen King broke into mainstream success a few decades ago, the first thing he wanted to do was pass the buck and help out like-minded but struggling writers. One of the things he came up with was an open offer: anyone could buy the rights to a film adaptation of any of his work for the cost of $1.

In 1983, then-unknown writer/director Frank Darabont took him up on the offer and made a short film out of King's story The Woman in the Room. It would be the start of a beautiful friendship.

Darabont was initially aiming for a career as a director of low-budget genre fare. But a decade later, he got the chance to adapt and direct another King story, this one an uncharacteristic prison-set novella called Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption. The final product, of course, was The Shawshank Redemption, which earned ten Oscar nominations and to this day is #2 on imdb.com's list of the top-rated 250 films ever.

In 1999, Darabont directed The Green Mile, King's other prison story ' and like Shawshank, it was nominated for Best Picture. But something was missing ' Darabont, now in the upper echelons of Hollywood filmmakers, had lost touch with the low-budget genre films he'd wanted to do from the beginning.

The solution was to go back to one of King's few stories that remained un-adapted: The Mist. We had a chance to meet Stephen King himself at a recent press conference.

'I love to work with Frank,' he says. 'Well, I don't work with Frank, I basically just stand aside and let him do his thing. The thing about Frank that I've always liked is that he still has a child's imagination coupled with an adult's ability to see the core of the material and then execute his vision. You've got a couple of things going on there that hook up together. You don't see it in a lot of filmmakers'with Frank, I feel very comfortable that I'm going to get something that's usually extraordinary.'

While, as Darabont likes to say, King single-handedly brought the horror genre out of the ghetto and into the mainstream, the director has been heretofore responsible for showing King's non-horror side in the two prison stories. 'I've got to tell this story,' King says. 'We live half the year in Sarasota, and my wife and I have worked out an agreement: she'll do all the heavy shopping, but she'll send me to do the crap she forgets. So I'm there in the supermarket one day, and I got my little cart, and I come around a corner and see this woman. I've got to say she's about 95. And she said, 'I know who you are! You write those stories, those awful horror stories. I don't respect that. I don't like that. I like uplifting movies like that Shawshank Redemption.''

After the laughter dies down, he continues: 'And I said, 'I wrote that!' And she said, 'No you didn't.' And that was it, she just went on. Talk about surreal.'

As it happens, The Mist had a special place in King's heart before Darabont decided to direct it ' prior to first writing it, in the late '70s, King found himself with a tough bout of writer's block. 'A friend of mind, Kirby McCauley, was putting an anthology together called Dark Forces,' he says. 'He wanted all these original stories from people in the genre. I said, 'You know, Kirby, I don't think I can do that 'cause I'm blocked,' and I was. I hadn't written anything. There were three books: there was Carrie, there was Salem's Lot, there was Night Shift, and I was kind of stuck, really.

'Later on, I happened to be in the local market, a lot of people were shopping, it was a little town market. I looked at the front windows, and I thought, you know if something bad happened, those windows would all blow in.' King grins sheepishly: ''Cause that's the way I think,' he says with a shrug. 'It's not necessarily a good thing, but it's been a profitable thing over the years.'

Apparently, that one idea did the trick: 'I thought about it and mulled it over, and this story came out of it. So I've always been grateful to The Mist, because it broke me out of a place where I couldn't think of anything, or do anything.'

The story itself chronicles the aftermath of a harsh storm in a small New England town. A father (Thomas Jane), his young son, and sixty-odd other people are buying groceries in the supermarket when a heavy mist floods the town, and inside it, strange somethings that don't seem to let anyone who ventures into the mist survive.

The brilliance of the story ' and this is where Darabont's high-pedigree writing and directing skills come in handy ' is the sharp characterizations of the townsfolk trapped in the store and the portrait of what fear can do to each of us. Most chilling is Mrs. Carmody (Marcia Gay Harden), a strange, lonely woman who starts preaching Old Testament-style that the mist signals the End Times ' and gaining a gaggle of frightened followers.

Because of Mrs. Carmody's role in the story and the man vs. man themes, many see the film as an allegory of current events and an attack on fundamentalism or evangelism. King, however, resists making parallels. 'Well, Mrs. Carmody was there back then [in 1980]. And the Mrs. Carmody in Frank's movie is very much the Mrs. Carmody that was in the story,' he says. 'I don't want to go out and make political statements. I'm a storyteller, and Frank's a storyteller, and that's what we do. But I've said it before and I'll say it again: if you're trying to do your best work, these things are going to come up. They're going to be part of the story and people are going to ask questions about it. Is The Mist a political story, is The Mist a story that has to do with the dangers of entrenched religion, fundamentalist religion, is The Mist a story about red versus blue' I'm not going to answer any of those questions. You go see the movie and maybe those questions will come up.'

Besides, people like Mrs. Carmody date way back. 'Even if she wasn't somebody I exactly knew, I had church on Sundays and Bible school every Thursday night, and heard all the stories of these awful things that were going to happen if you told lies or masturbated or this or that or the other thing. And they all had scripture from the Bible to back it up. At the same time, my friend Chris and I fell in love with a guy named Jack van Impy, who's this televangelist. He's one of the early televangelists.' King's voice begins to drip with amused sarcasm. 'He knew all about the international conspiracy, and how the apocalypse was coming, and how you had to be ready. We just loved his delivery, and I just kind of mocked it for Mrs. Carmody. But the Mrs. Carmodys of the world are out there.'

While King wants you to make your own assumptions about the film, he opens up a little about his own beliefs when pressed. 'I have nothing against religion, in spite of my upbringing. But what happens is, religion cross-pollinates with politics. And if you've seen The Mist, you know that in some ways there are political parties that spontaneously develop in the course of things ' which is what happens in any situation when there's a crisis. The Mist adds religion to an already volatile mix.

'There's always someone to say, 'Well, we have the answer. We have the only answer,'' King continues. 'Because whatever the religion might happen to be, they're the ones who say, 'We have the only answer, so let's get down on your knees and pray about it, and on your way out, there's guns in the vestry.' Or, 'we'll kick your ass because our god is bigger than your god.''

But then he abruptly backs off from the topic: 'If it causes you to think of the current world situation, then, well, it does. But I'm not prepared to say in one way or another.' He wants to stress that despite all the high-minded discussion, the movie is a fun thriller, too. 'On some level, we have to remember, this is a movie about big [things] in the mist, too.'

That desire to just want to tell a good story drove Darabont's decision to alter King's original ending. (Don't worry, I'm not about to reveal anything ' if you'll notice, I haven't even told you what's hiding in the mist.) King is asked what he thinks of the new ending.

'I loved it. I loved it. It puts a button on it. And I thought about this when I wrote the story ' if you guys read the story, then you'll see that Frank has been very faithful to it...but when Frank and I would talk about The Mist, he would always say to me, it's got to have a strong ending. What we were too kind to say to each other is that the [original] story has, I wouldn't say it has a weak ending, but it's the kind of ending my late mother didn't respect. She called them Alfred Hitchcock endings, where you were kind of left to make up your own mind. She had contempt for that.

'So Frank came up with an ending to the movie that I thought was terrific on the page, and the only time I ever wavered was when I saw it myself and I said, 'This is so shocking that there ought to be ads in the newspaper that say if you reveal the last five minutes of the movie, you will be hung by the neck until dead.' That's the one thing that I hate about the Internet age, is that all this stuff gets out.' He's not just hyping it up, either ' it really is an incredible ending.

In his personal life, King is an avid reader of all genres ' he cites Richard Matheson's novel I Am Legend as one of his biggest influences, and recommends authors Robert Block, Kelly Link, and Jack Ketchum, among others ' and an avid moviegoer as well. He still has an excitement about the horror genre even in the face of what he calls the Splat Pack ' a nice way of referring to the gory horror movies that have become known as 'torture porn,' like Hostel, the Saw franchise, and Captivity.

'Here's a movie that was made by an adult,' King says of The Mist. 'I'm not going to name any names, but it isn't part of the Splat Pack of young guys who haven't quite come to the realization that this is as serious as any other genre.

'I mean, I can't wait to go see P2,' he clarifies. 'I'm excited about it. I was excited to see the remake of Halloween. Hostel II, I was there the first day that baby opened. It's like every other kind of movie: there are some of them that I like, and there are some of them that I don't. But in a lot of cases, it feels to me like I'm not dealing with reality, like I'm dealing with some subgenre...they don't feel like the work of grownups. They feel like the work of people who are sort of still learning how to tell a more textured story.'

Then again, King is well aware that much of his own work hasn't exactly been turned into the best movies. 'There's never been any frustration,' he says. 'Either they're good or they're bad, and if they're bad I just kind of laugh. There's a story about this college newspaper reporter who came to see James M. Cain toward the end of his life, and the young reporter was bemoaning what Hollywood had done to his books. And Cain whipped right around in his chair and pointed at his shelf and said, 'They haven't done a damn thing, son, they're all right up there.' And that's the case.'

Adaptation-wise, King has actually been on a renewed hot streak lately. This past summer, 1408, based on a novella of his, became a surprise box office hit. 'I think it's good to see my movies back again, too,' he says. 'They were in rehab for a while, but they're better now. No, I mean, whenever anybody talks to me, whether it's a musical version of Carrie - there've actually been two play versions of Carrie, one great and the other so weirdly bad that it was great, too, it just sort of was ' whatever anybody wants to try, I'm up for that, as long as they make a minimal amount of sense.'

Besides, what's the worst that could happen' 'Sometimes it's good, sometimes it's Children of the Corn. You just can't tell what's going to happen. But I'm always interested to see.'

King still continues to write constantly. 'I have a regular schedule for writing: in the morning. I've done it for enough years so that those things turn on. The real trick is, it's nice to have two or three ideas that are worth working on. That's something you can't always depend on. Usually, God's been good to me, I've had a lot of interesting ideas, and I've had a lot of fun.'

Ultimately, King thinks the secret to his staggering success is rather simple: 'I'm afraid of everything. It shows in my work: elevators, cars. The thing that started my new book was basically a combination of an accident that I had and a truck that was backing up and the beeper was broken. Somebody said 'look out,' and a big long novel came out of that.'

As hard as it is to believe, in person, the man who has given millions of readers nightmares seems quite harmless and charming. Sort of like that rich uncle who shows up during the holidays, the one the kids love. Say, did he mention he was working on another novel' 'Yes, it's called Duma Kee.' And then, with an actual twinkle in his eye, he adds: 'It's going to be out in January, and they make wonderful presents.'