FROM PAGE TO SCREEEN

Ever since Brian De Palma’s movie version of CARRIE, film makers have tried to translate Stephen King’s stories to the screen. Some successfully, some less so. Sometimes, the horror maestro himself is the first to criticize their efforts. King was especially harsh on Kubrick’s THE SHINING and Mark L. Lester’s FIRESTARTER. What makes a Stephen King adaptation successful? Mick Garris might know a thing or two about that. He adapted King a total of seven times, starting with SLEEPWALKERS in 1992, and even collaborated with the author a number of times. Roel Haanen talked to Mick Garris in early 2017, as part of a Stephen King Special in the fanzine Schokkend Nieuws. That is why this conversation doesn’t delve into the other areas of Garris’ professional life, such as writing, podcasting and producing TV-shows like Masters of Horror.

Could you tell me how you got the job of directing SLEEPWALKERS in 1992?

It’s an interesting story. We were both represented by the same agency in Los Angeles, who also represented Clive Barker at the time. I had done PSYCHO IV a few years earlier and I was writing and doing a lot of things and they arranged a meeting for me at the studio, Columbia Pictures, where it was made. And they loved me. They said: We love you for this, we just have to meet with another director as a formality, because of our relationship with his agent. So they met the other director and they hired him. He started rewriting the script and taking it somewhere very far removed from what King had written, including adding a planet of Sleepwalkers. The studio wasn’t too crazy about what he was doing, so they asked me to have another meeting. It was a lunch meeting. What I didn’t know and was not prepared for, was that they had already moved me into the production office. They had hired me already. But it was a good meeting. And King had director approval on this, and they send him the movies of the various directors who were up for the job, and he was quite surprised that a movie with IV in the title, especially a third sequel to an iconic classic movie, was actually good. He really liked the film. On that he gave his approval of me.

Were you a big fan of Stephen King at the time?

Oh, huge. Yeah. I am old enough to have read all his books when they first came out, The Stand, The Shining – not Carrie though, I read that after the movie came out, like everybody else. But I loved all of them passionately, never knowing of course that in years to come I would have anything to do with bringing them to the screen.

Was that a benefit or a hindrance?

I think it can only have been beneficial, because it gave me a lot of respect for the source material, especially when it came to the miniseries. I think if a regular television director had done THE STAND it could have been disastrous. I had so much love for that book that I didn’t want to see it fucked up by anybody, least of all me.

But that placed an even bigger burden on you to do it right.

That’s true. It was very intimidating, particularly THE STAND. It was such a beloved book and it was his bestselling title, still is to this day. I had only done small films before this. Small casts, small number of locations, and here was this 465 page script, a vast cross country odyssey in a dystopian world. Yeah, it was a big burden on my shoulders, but we had a great script and some really talented and passionate people involved, and I was naïve enough to think that I could do it anyway. I believed  that the power of the story was what dictated it. We had some very, let’s say, primitive special effects, and there were places where the budget didn’t quite stretch as far as we hoped it would, but we had the power of the story, the power of Stephen King’s vision. Books and movies are different, but when you have a cinematic author like Stephen King then a vision can become pretty clear, when you adapt to the screen.

Is that the main reason why King’s work is so attractive for filmmakers to adapt, aside from his being a brand name of course? That his writing is so cinematic?

That’s one of the reasons. Even more than that: there is an emotional resonance to what he writes. He writes characters we identify with. We either are those characters or know people like them. And there’s a fearlessness about the emotions. He’s not afraid to reveal emotional pain as well as the typical tropes of horror. His characters are really strong and even though a lot of his writing is internal in the books, and in that way decidedly non-cinematic, there are ways to bring it to the fore.

Famously, someone asked King: What do you think of so-and-so fucking up your book? And King said: He didn’t fuck up my book, it’s right there on the shelf.

Having worked with King where he had written the screenplay himself, like on SLEEPWALKERS, THE STAND and THE SHINING, that was a big step ahead, that gave me the confidence that we could actually do this. Naiveté and fear go a long way in the creative process. To be afraid of fucking it up is the best way not to fuck it up.

Did you ever have any creative disagreement with him?

He always left the film making decisions up to me. He understands the process and the role of the director. He never once told me how he thought I should handle the scene. He never once said to me that he didn’t like the way I was doing this or that. Sometimes I would ask him what some of the motivating factors were for what the characters would do here and there, or how they would link together, but that’s a great resource to have on your set, to have the world’s greatest bestselling author available to talk to about these things. On THE STAND he was around like a third of half of the time we were shooting. On THE SHINING at least half of the time.  He was writing The Green Mile at the same time, in the Stanley Hotel.

Now, as far as the writing is concerned, the studio asked for some changes in the script of SLEEPWALKERS and I was happy to do them, but Stephen said: No, I’ll do it. And the next morning there would be these great scenes coming out of the fax machine. I still changed a few little things, like the scene where the sleepwalkers are making love and it reflects the monsters inside. But I would always run them passed him, because I wanted him to feel that it was of a piece with his work, and he was always really supportive.

At the time, early nineties, there had already been a few King adaptations that were so bad they even elicited scorn and derision from King himself. Did that play on your mind when you did SLEEPWALKERS?

It’s really hard to make a film and nobody sets out to make a bad film. But sometimes there are too many cooks, or it’s made for the wrong reason. LAWNMOWER MAN didn’t much resemble anything King had written. I think the farther afield you go from the source material, the more likely it is that you’re going in the wrong direction. Adapting a book in the cinematic form, there are a lot of changes that have to be made. But to me the best King adaptations are the ones that stayed true to the books, like THE DEAD ZONE and MISERY. Maybe it’s a matter of respect: remembering why you’re telling the story and remembering why the book was bought to be made into a movie in the first place. It wasn’t just so you could put Stephen King’s name on the poster, it was because there was a story worth telling.

In some cases King was really supportive of the changes filmmakers have made to his stories. Like the ending Frank Darabont wrote for THE MIST.

I was just thinking of that. Yes, King said he would have written it like that if he had thought of it. I thought it was devastating and fantastic, but it might be why the film didn’t do very well.

Didn’t you change the time in which RIDING THE BULLET was set?

Yeah. I had lost my mother and brother and when I read that short story it really resonated with me. To me it was about making choices between life or death. I don’t want to sound pretentious about it, but I felt it was a good opportunity to do something that was kind of metaphorical. The passing of the sixties was a life and death choice that was being mirrored today. So, to turn a personal life and death choice into a metaphor for a societal life and death choice in the era of Vietnam and all of the political unrest that shook the world and has resonated ever since. But it was also very personal to me and I told King my thoughts about it and asked him if he would mind if I adapted it in that regard and he encouraged me and was very supportive all the way. It was a dollar baby at the time, but by the time the film got financed, on a very low budget, he still made a million dollars. To this day it’s probably the least financially successful film I made, but it’s the one that’s closest to my heart.

Which one was the most successful commercially?

By far, THE STAND. From what ABC told me it was the highest rated miniseries of all time. Almost everybody saw it. The week it aired it was number one, two, three and four in ratings. The ratings went up every one of the four nights, more people watched every night. Now, THE SHINING was the best critically. It was also successful – it was in the top ten – but  it didn’t do what THE STAND did. There was no negative review at that time. Of course this was before the haters on the internet made themselves known: How dare you debase the memory of Stanley Kubrick!

But the versions are so different. Your miniseries manages to convey the family tragedy that is at the heart of the novel.

Thank you. That’s exactly what I was trying to do. You know, The Shining was such a personal book for Stephen King. He wrote it when he was a drinking alcoholic. It was about the guilt he felt for having feelings of violence towards his child, feelings he couldn’t suppress. That boiler was very much a metaphor for what was going on inside him because of his drinking. He wrote the teleplay when he was a recovering alcoholic, who hadn’t drunk in a long time and that gave him a different perspective. So that book was very personal to King and what Kubrick did with it, may be a great Kubrick movie, but as an adaptation of a very human and warm novel it’s very icy and distant.

One of the great improvements is the role of Wendy Torrance who in the Kubrick version is barely even a character. She’s just this frail, vulnerable woman whining, crying and screaming. In your version she’s the one we identify with the most.

That’s great to hear. We wanted to portray her as a strong woman who was not going to just capitulate to her husband’s madness, but to actually fight for herself and her child. Because Jack is not going to.

When you started doing THE SHINING was there any hesitation on your part because of the status of the Kubrick film?

Well, here again naiveté comes into play. At the time I just thought: Wow, the opportunity to work with King again on one of my favorite novels. The scariest book I ever read! When I saw the Kubrick movie, two days before it came out [Mick Garris was a film critic at the time], I was so crushingly disappointed, because it wasn’t what I expected or hoped it would be. And what younger people don’t know, who weren’t around at the time, was that the reviews were disastrous. It was a huge success, but with a very young audience. The reviews were uniformly negative. Now I see it as a brilliant Kubrick movie, but it was not the book. I got the chance to do the book. But the first time I ran up against what you’re talking about, the hesitation, was when I was talking to Gary Sinise about doing THE SHINING and I was asking him if he was willing to play Jack Torrance and he said: You know, I’d be pretty hesitant to step into Mr. Nicholson’s shoes. I’ll never forget it. I had never even thought about that. But a lot of actors felt the same way. We talked to two or three British actors who had no problems with it and we even cast one of them as Jack. But after he had agreed to do it he never showed up for the fittings. Steven Weber came in and read with Rebecca DeMornay and just blew us away with his performance. I wasn’t even aware of his comic work.

I always felt that some of the supernatural elements of King’s novels don’t particularly translate well to film. As long as King is telling you these things are happening, you believe them, because you read them through the voice of the characters who are seeing this, but as soon as they are on the screen, they stop working. I’ll give an example from another movie: in DREAMCATCHER one of the characters gets a telepathic phone call and he answers with his handgun. Now, in the novel there’s this internal monologue which tells us that the character knows this to be insane. In the movie there’s just the actor putting the gun to his ear and having a phone call.

It looks silly.

Exactly, and in THE SHINING I always felt the same way about the hedge animals. They were terrifying in the book, but as soon as you see them in the film, they lose much of their frightfulness. That’s why I always loved Kubrick’s solution.

That’s a valid point. I don’t disagree with you; sometimes things are better left to the imagination or left out. But if you ask anybody what they remember about the book, they will say the hedge animals. It was such a landmark scene in the book that people would have felt cheated if we had left it out. And we had technology that Kubrick did not have in 1980. So having them in the movie was very important to me and to King. It was incredibly difficult to do, but we really wanted to give it the college try to make it work. It was kind of primitive CGI in some of the shots and then the actual puppet hedge animal, which I have outside in front of my office. We thought that we’d give it a go and we did our best.

But even with the best CGI I don’t think it would ever be really scary on screen.

You always have to figure out how you’re going to make something from the book cinematic. For example, the Lincoln Tunnel scene in The Stand takes place entirely in the dark in the book. You can’t see a thing. It’s like you’re dipped in a bucket of black paint. How do you bring that to life on the screen? So, I thought about it and we decided to illuminate the scene with dying headlights, taillights and blinkers on the cars. In RIDING THE BULLET I tried to bring something which is really internal and inherently non-filmic to the screen, and that’s how I came up with the lead character playing his own conscience. Richard Matheson once told me that books are internal and film is external and I always wanted experiment with that, to try and make the internal external.

When you did THE STAND computer generated imagery was just beginning to become the norm, but it wasn’t developed enough for you to really exploit to your benefit. If you look at what’s possible today, do you sometimes wish you could go back and do it over with today’s possibilities?

Oh definitely. But you have to remember that even by the standards of the time the CGI was shitty. Despite the fact that we were working with a 28 million dollar budget we were working with a  very low budget company.

But I would have loved to have had the freedom and technology and budgets they have today. I’m doing an episode of ONCE UPON A TIME next month and I’m watching the episodes for homework and I can’t believe this is made for television: the elaborate costumes and every single shot has gorgeous special effects in it. And then I look at the Hand of God in THE STAND… You know, even then it was a face palm.

And how about in terms of censorship? At the time a lot less was possible than today.

One of the first notes we got was: Don’t show any dead people with their eyes open. Our middle finger was raised in defiance when in the title sequence the camera moves in on a dead secretary and her clouded eyes are looking right into the camera. That was our fuck you to that. We stretched the envelope a bit on that one. When King’s name is above the title there are certain expectations, so we tried to get past that by having a warning at the beginning that this was mature content.

Was THE STAND the hardest of all the King movies or series you did?

Yes, it was the hardest thing I’ve ever done and will do, I hope. We were on the road for nineteen weeks, shooting. It was really difficult trying to shoot a dead world within a live world. Right outside the frame there are planes, trains and automobiles and everything else going on.

THE SHINING probably comes closest to what I had in mind as a filmmaker. You know, it’s the only time in my thirty years as a director where I felt I had enough time and money to tell the story. That’s a pretty sad statement when it’s just one time in thirty years. But that’s the way the industry works. I’m sure James Cameron would say: If only I had another fifty billion bucks!

I don’t know if this is true, but read somewhere that they’re again moving away from a theatrical adaptation of The Stand and are again thinking about doing it as a TV production.

Last thing I heard was that Joshua Boone was attached to direct a two part theatrical movie. Would be interesting if they moved it to TV again. [As of 2020 this TV series of The Stand is finally a reality - Ed.] When I did THE STAND they had been trying to do it as a feature for fifteen years at Warner Bros. and never were able to do it. And the miniseries format was something that King was excited about. He called it a novel for television. But even with six hours of actual television time we still had to do the original version of The Stand, not the expanded version. People are always asking me: Couldn’t you have included The Kid? But it would have been ten hours long and that might not be what anybody had wanted to sit through.

Maybe not at the time, but look at what they’re doing to something like WESTWORLD. They’ve turned an 90 minute movie into ten hours and people love it.

Yeah, if you could do it today for HBO you could stretch it out.

But don’t you hate it when they stretch it to no end? Like UNDER THE DOME?

Yeah. The first season was very successful, but the second season went way down. I thought the book was very powerful, but the TV show felt like television. It didn’t have that cinematic quality that a lot of TV shows have that are being done today. Even though it was made for Hulu 11/22/63 also had that television feel to it. That book is so passionate and romantic and fantastic, but somewhere in the translation from page to screen they somehow lost the magic. It happens. It’s really difficult to make that connection.

In THE STAND we had a 126 speaking parts and ten of fifteen major roles and you’ve got to connect to each of those people in an emotional way.

Which character in THE STAND was hardest to cast?

Mmmm. I can tell you the easiest one. That was Matt Frewer. On the page the Trashcan Man is just insane and incendiary and comes off as completely off his rocker. The first actor we read for any role was Matt Frewer and he came in and he auditioned with the scene where he finally meets Randall Flagg and he shows him the flame. And Matt brought pathos to it that was completely unexpected. King and I were both in that casting session and it brought tears to our eyes. As soon as Matt left the room we looked at each other and knew we had found our Trashcan Man.

The hardest would have been Stu Redman. There were a lot of people we thought about and talked to. We found Gary Sinise by accident. There was an agent who was proposing an actor for another part. And this agent sent me two five dollar bills to go see a movie that that actor was in. And Gary Sinise was also in this movie. And although we never used the other actor, who was great but just not really right for the part, we found our Stu Redman. He just seemed to have that Gary Cooper, grounded, soul of America personality that worked great. The movie was OF MICE AND MEN and Gary was already so much Stu Redman in that film.

So the other actor, that wasn’t John Malkovich, was it?

No, it was Casey Siemaszko. And the agent wanted him for the Nick Andros role, the one that Rob Lowe ended up playing. Casey is a terrific actor, but we went with Rob Lowe. Thing is: we started getting pressure from ABC who initially said: We don’t need stars, Stephen King is our star. Until we started getting into the process of casting. Then it was: Well, what kind of names you got? Waddaya think of Rob Lowe? But Rob was an interesting guy. He was really intelligent. A huge Stephen King fan and he wanted the part. But he was pitched to us to play Larry Underwood, the Baby, Can You Dig Your Man-character. They wanted him to play the pretty boy rockstar. I said: I would be interested in Rob if he played against character, so I offered him the Nick Andros part and he loved the idea.

Do you think THE STAND would ever work as a feature film?

I don’t know how you’d get all of that into one movie. Maybe two. But never say never. There are people out there that could make the telephone book into an interesting feature.

How would you describe your relationship with King now? Are you still talking about working together?

Yes, we still talk about projects. There’s a pilot that may or may not happen, which he allowed me to get the rights for. We are friends. We come from very similar backgrounds: raised by single mothers under rather tight circumstances. There’s no greater feeling than working with him. He’s such a source of inspiration and support. He’s an incredibly generous, funny, smart and encouraging guy and lots and lots of fun to hang out with. I haven’t seen him in a couple of years now and I really miss him a lot. 

He stays up in Maine all the time? Doesn’t travel much?

No, he doesn’t travel much. He also has a home in Florida during the winter. But he’s so easily identified: he’s six foot five and stands out in a crowd. He’s that rare rock star novelist that when he walks down the street everybody knows who he is.

Have you ever talked to him about his own directorial effort, MAXIMUM OVERDRIVE? I know he’s quite candid about how it worked out.

We talked about it. Again, this was a period when he was still drinking and abusing drugs and the like. He had a really good time making the movie, but he was also saddled with an Italian crew that Dino DeLaurentiis had assembled who did not speak English well. We thought for a while that we would work on something where I would produce and he would direct. Gerald’s Game was one of the books we talked about at the time. But then he had his accident and that knocked out any will he had to direct. I think he’s quite happy writing. It was so devastating. I’m sure you’ve read On Writing.

Yes, of course.

Very unpretentious, human book. That last chapter, On Living, was one of the most emotionally wrenching things I’ve read in my life.  It’s an incredibly inspirational book, written in a language that makes it feel like you’re sitting in a room talking with him.

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This interview first appeared in a shorter version in the Dutch fanzine Schokkend Nieuws. Above is the full version of this talk, edited only for clarity.