Stephen King: The Mind’s Eye Master
By Cole Smithey
Aside from being one of the most prolific writers of his generation Stephen King’s short stories, novellas and novels have provided Hollywood and television with a treasure trove of material. As soon as you start reeling off titles like "Carrie," "The Shining," "Misery," "The Shawshank Redemption" and "The Green Mile" indelible images flash in your mind’s eye.
Of the vast number of directors that have adapted King’s work to the screen, Frank Darabont has enjoyed a success that demonstrates an innate comprehension of Stephen King’s vision and thematic impetus. So much so that it took Darabont to write a better ending for King’s novella "The Mist" before he could tackle making the best true horror movie to come out in years. A father and young son become stranded in a populated grocery store in Maine where a deadly mist has enshrouded the area as part of a terrible storm. Hidden in the thick fog are gigantic insects and prehistoric creatures that ensnare the store’s inhabitants in a grip of fear that brings out their worst and best qualities.
I enjoyed interviewing Stephen King at a press conference in Manhattan at Park Avenue’s Regency Hotel, where the candid and loquacious author seemed to be having as much fun as the journalists.
CS: I understand that you wrote "The Mist" during the Viet Nam war but that it wasn’t published until 1980. What were the origins of the story and what do you see as its significance in 2007?
SK: Well, it wasn’t during the Viet Nam war. The Viet Nam war was over by the time I wrote it. A friend of mine, Kirby McCauley, was putting together an anthology called "Dark Forces" and he wanted all these original stories from people who wrote in the genre. And I said, "You know Kirby, I don’t think I can do that because I’m blocked; I’m not writing anything." And I hadn’t. I’d finished three books. There was "Carrie," "Salem’s Lot" and there was "Night Shift," and I was kind of stuck really. I happened to be in the local market one time and a lot of people were shopping and I looked at the front windows and thought if something bad happened those windows would all blow in, ‘cause that’s the way I think. It’s not necessarily a good thing, but it’s been a profitable thing over the years. I’ve mulled it over and this story came out of it, and I’ve always been grateful to "The Mist" because it kind of broke me out of a place where I couldn’t seem to do anything, and this story just came very, very naturally. In terms of Viet Nam or any other conflict, if you’re writing seriously—by which I mean trying as hard as you can—the issues in your mind, the things you’ve been through, are all going to play a part.
CS: The attack on fundamentalism was there back then?
SK: Well, Mrs. Carmody was there back then, and Mrs. Carmody in Frank’s movie is very much the Mrs. Carmody that was in the story. I don’t want to go out and make political statements. I’m a storyteller, and Frank is a storyteller, and that’s what we do. But I’ve said before and I’ll say again, that if you’re trying to do your best work these things are going to come up and they’re going to become 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 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 those questions will come up, any maybe you’ll discuss them. If it serves as a springboard—that’s great.
CS: Fear has played such a major role in your work. How has the notion of fear evolved in your mind?
SK: Well, fear is a survival function. If you’re afraid of certain things: walking down the center line of a highway at night, going out in hunting season in Maine and you’re not dressed in something that’s red—you’re afraid that you might get shot. In the stories that I write the only thing that I’ve tried to do is to provide people with nightmares, which are really just safe places to put those fears for awhile. Because you can say afterward that it was all just make-believe anyway, so I just took my emotions for a walk. This is a negative emotion; it’s kind of a pitbull in the human mind and it needs to have a place to walk and it needs to be petted every now and then too. Sooner or later every one of us faces fear in our own life. You might call it cancer instead of things in the mist, but we’re all afraid of those things and it seems valid to me to explore them. I’m just glad I do what I do because it’s allowed me to vent a lot of this stuff and get paid for it, whereas people who go to see shrinks pay them. This is a win-win for me.
CS: "The Mist" is in the sci-fi genre, but most people don’t think of you as a sci-fi writer.
SK: I’ve written a lot of stories that I think of as sort of science fiction. For me it always has to be "sort of" science fiction because I was a C chemistry student and a B- physics student. So I was never a geek and I never had a lot of those skills or that knowledge base. But on the other hand I saw a lot of movies in the ‘50s like "The Thing" and "Them," and I know that radiation causes monsters and, most important of all, I know that if we mess around too much with the unknown something awful will happen.
CS: Can you talk about working with Frank Darabont.
SK: I love to work with Frank. Well basically I don’t work with Frank. I just stand aside and let Frank 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. So, you’ve got a couple of things going on there that hook up together that you don’t see in a lot of filmmakers. You do see it in some. Frank has always done good work. I feel very comfortable that I’m going to get something from Frank that’s going to be, usually, extraordinary. While in my case he’s done "The Woman in the Room," "The Shawshank Redemption," he’s done "The Green Mile," and he’s done "The Mist." It isn’t just me. I hear from other people, all the time, say, "I just love those movies."
I’ve gotta tell this story. We live half the year down in Sarasota [Florida], and my wife and I have worked out an agreement where she’ll do the heavy shopping once a week, but she’ll send me for the crap that she forgets. So I’m there in the supermarket and I’ve got my little cart and I come around the corner and there’s this woman—I’m going to say she’s about 95—and she says, "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." And I said, "I wrote that." And she said, "No you didn’t." And that was it; she went on. Talk about feeling surreal–I’m thinking, "Maybe I didn’t write that one."
CS: Have you been frustrated with any of the film adaptations of your books?
SK: No, there’s never been any frustration. Either they’re good or they’re bad, and if they’re bad I just kind of laugh. There’s a story about the college newspaper reporter who came to see James M. Cain toward the end of his life. The young reporter was bemoaning what Hollywood had done to his books, and Cain whipped right around in his chair and pointed to his shelf and said, "They haven’t done a damn thing son; they’re all right up there." And that’s the case.
I’m always interested to see what’s going to happen when you beat the piñata. It’s always a bit different. 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.
CS: Who are some of your biggest influences?
SK: The biggest influence on my life is going to be a movie soon, "I am Legend" by Richard Matheson. I’d read Poe and Lovecraft and those guys, and thought that they were good, but I didn’t have that kind of visceral connection where I thought "Yeah, this guy’s doing it on my block—I like that."
CS: What are some of your biggest fears?
SK: I’m afraid of everything—it shows in my work—elevators, cars. One of the things 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 and somebody said, "Look out," and a whole big long novel came out of that.
CS: You’ve given permission for your stories to be adapted for different kinds of projects, for example student films. What’s your thinking behind that?
SK: Whenever anybody talks to me—whether it’s a musical version of "Carrie"—there’s actually been two play versions of "Carrie." One was great, and the other was so weirdly bad that it was great too, so whatever anybody wants to try I’m sort of up for that as long as they make a minimal amount of sense.
I’m happy if nobody else came along and wanted to make another movie, I could live with that but I’m hoping that Frank and I can work together again at least four more times before we’re done.
CS: What was your reaction when you read the new ending that Frank wrote for "The Mist"?
SK: I loved it—it puts a button on it. I thought about this when I wrote the story. Frank has been very faithful to the story and when he and I talked about "The Mist," he would always say to me, "It’s gotta have a strong ending." What we were too kind to say to each other was that the story has—I won’t say it’s a weak ending exactly but it was the kind of ending that my late mother didn’t respect. She called them Alfred Hitchcock endings, and you’re kind of left to make up your own mind. She had nothing but contempt for that. So Frank came up with an ending to the movie that I thought was terrific on the page. The only time that I ever wavered even slightly was when I actually saw it and I said to myself this is so shocking that there ought to be ads in the newspaper that say, "If you reveal the last five minutes of this movie, you will be hung by the neck until dead."
