| Stephen King and Frank Darabont Step Out of "The Mist" |
| Written by Brad Balfour | |||||||
Page 1 of 5  "Stephen King's The Mist" stars Thomas Jane, Marcia Gay Harden, Laurie Holden  The cast of" Stephen King's The Mist" wonders if there is any life beyond the mist  Legendary writer Stephen King and Talented director Frank Darabont colabrate to make King's book into reality Born in Portland, Maine, King started out publishing his first story in a fanzine but quickly graduated to the professional publishing world. While he cranked out his many novels, Hollywood discovered his work and the rest, as they say, is history. He has made more than $40 million a year, has been nominated for numerous awards, owns his own radio stations, has played in rock bands, has three kids and keeps writing even when he threatened to retire and was injured in an auto accident. As for Frank Darabont, he's been one director who has achieved incredible success turning King's books into films. This three-time Oscar nominee was born in a refugee camp in 1959, the son of Hungarians who fled Budapest during the failed 1956 Hungarian revolution. Darabont is one of only six filmmakers with the unique distinction of having had his first two features receive nominations for the Best Picture Oscars—1994's "The Shawshank Redemption" (with a total of seven nominations) and 1999's "The Green Mile" (four nominations), both based on King's stories. In cinematically adapting "The Mist," a King short story from the early '80s, Darabont has defied expectations, improving on the story with a powerful unexpected ending. Recently the two sat at a press conference and expressed their love for all things weird, including each other. Q: Stephen, you originally wrote this novella during the Vietnam War and yet it seems as much a story for today. What were the origins of the story, and why do you see it as appropriate for 2007? SK: It wasn't during the Vietnam War. The Vietnam War was over by the time that I wrote it. Kirby McCauley [King's friend and agent at the time] was putting together an anthology called "Dark Forces," and he wanted all these original stories from people who wrote in the genre. 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 had just finished three books. There was "Carrie,"Salem's Lot, "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. I looked at the front windows and thought, if something bad happened those windows would all blow in—because that's the way I think. It's not necessarily a good thing, but it's been a profitable thing over the years. As I mulled it over, this story came out of it. I've always been grateful to "The Mist" because it broke me out of a place where I couldn't seem to do anything. This story just came very naturally, and in terms of Vietnam or any other conflict, if you're writing seriously—by which I mean trying as hard as you can—the issues that are in your mind and the things you've been through are all going to play a part. Q: The movie attacks [religious] fundamentalism. Is this an issue that was relevant back then, and if so, does it apply even today? SK: Well, Mrs. Carmody [played by Marcia Gay Harden] was there back then, and Mrs. Carmody in Frank's [Darabont] 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's a storyteller, that's what we do. But I've said this before, and I'll say again, that if you're trying to do your best work, these things are going to come up. 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 religion, fundamentalist religion? Is "The Mist" a story about red vs. blue? I'm not going to answer any of those questions. You go see the movie. Those questions will come up and maybe you'll discuss them. If it serves as a springboard, that's great. Q: Fear has played such a major role in your work. How has the notion of "fear" evolved in your mind, and how do you apply it in your work? SK: 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 not dressed in something that's red, or orange, you're afraid that you might get shot. So I think of fear as a survival function, and in the stories that I write, the only thing that I've tried to do is provide people with nightmares, which are really safe places to put those fears for a while. You can say afterwards, "Well, it was all just make-believe anyway, so I just took my emotions for a walk." This is a negative emotion, it's a kind of a "pit bull" in the human mind. It needs to have a place to walk, and it needs to be petted every now and then and that's what these stories try to do. In "The Mist," you know that these people are trapped in a supermarket and things happen to them that are inexplicable, or not normal. But sooner or later every one of us faces those things 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. But if I have any more ideas about fear, I'm 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 shrinks, pay them. This is a "win-win" for me. Q: This movie straddles between the science fiction and supernatural genres. How did you view this project? SK: I was writing the book. That's the short answer to that. In terms of the science fiction, 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. 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. FD: The first law of physics: radiation makes monsters [laughs]. I love this stuff too. We have a common genetic predisposition towards loving these sorts of things. This is what brought me to this master's work in the first place, because I love this stuff. But to me, it's the fun part, it's the trappings. Is it a little science fiction? Yeah. Is it a little horror? Hopefully, it's a lot horror. But ultimately what makes him such a muscular, master storyteller is the fact that he never dissolves just into the trappings. It's about the human core of the storytelling. It's always about that journey of the human condition. That's what makes it particularly valid, particularly relevant. It's an examination of fear. It's an examination of people operating in a pressure cooker of fear where fear replaces reason. That's why I've always loved this story. It wasn't so much about the "mist" outside the windows with the groovy critters in it. It's about what the people are going through inside the market. It winds up being pretty real, and pretty disturbing because there's nothing scarier than human nature and human behaviors. That's why I thought the thing had some muscle. It's about fearing fear itself. What does it do to people, how does it wig them out? How does it compel us? Does it bring us together? Does it tear us apart? Do we make mistakes? This is pretty meaty stuff for a filmmaker, and I, I can't thank you enough for letting me make the movie. SK: Aw gee. FD: [laughs] So there. Q: A lot of writers get disenfranchised when Hollywood comes in and tries to turn one of their books into a movie. What makes you feel so comfortable in turning over your projects to Frank? FD: Tell them about your big "wang." SK: Yeah, I used to have a big "wang," but of course I was younger then. It was a "Wang Word Processor." Get your minds out of the gutter. [laughs] I love to work with Frank. I've worked with Frank and I don't work with Frank. I basically stand aside and let Frank do his thing and Frank 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, and they do good work. Frank has always done good work. I feel very comfortable that I'm going to get something from Frank that's gonna be usually extraordinary. In my case, he's done "The Woman in the Room," "Shawshank," "The Green Mile" and he's done "The Mist." And it isn't just me. I hear from other people all the time. They'll say, "I just loved those movies, you know." I gotta tell this story. So I'm there in the supermarket one day and I've got my little cart. I come around the corner and there's this woman, I'm going to say she was 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." And I said, "I wrote that." And she said, "No you didn't." And that was it [laughs]. |