| Stephen King and Frank Darabont Step Out of "The Mist" - Page 3 |
| Written by Brad Balfour | |||||||
Page 3 of 5  Laurie Holden, Sam Witwer, Frances Sternhagen and Thomas Jane in "Stephen King's The Mist"  Andre Braugher plays as Brent Norton, the voice of reason to seekout help and see how far this mist really is  Thomas Jane as David Drayton plays a torn father trying to protect his son from unknown terror in "Stephen King's The Mist" Q: I know that Frank wrote the ending for you. How was your reaction when you first read that ending? SK: I loved it. I loved it. It puts a button on it. I thought about this when I wrote the story. If you guys have got it, you'll see that Frank has been very faithful to the story. But when Frank and I talked about "The Mist," he would always say to me, you know, it's gotta have a strong ending. FD: And you would say the same thing to me from time to time. SK: That's right. 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—you were kind of left to make up your own mind. She had nothing but contempt for that. Frank came up with an ending to the movie that I thought was terrific on the page, and the only time that I ever wavered even slightly was when I actually saw it. 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'll be hung by the neck until death." That's the one thing that I hate about the Internet age: all that stuff goes out. FD: Me too, me too. Q: How do you feel about this adaptation compared to Frank's other three? SK: I love it. Frank does good work, and this thing has a different look. It's a wonderful sort of documentary feel. It's separated from the other field of horror suspense movies of the last couple of years because of that documentary feel. It has a sense of "The Twilight Zones" that I loved when I was a kid, "The Outer Limits" episodes that I loved as a kid. But also, here's a movie that was made by an adult. It's not—I'm not going to name any names, but it isn't part of this pack young guys who haven't quite come to a realization yet that this is as serious as any other genre. So you've got a picture that asks some serious questions if people want to ask them, or if they just want to have a good time, it's there too. But it has a wonderful realistic look that I was just crazy about. Frank also has a number of different actors that he's worked with over the years. Some of them are in the movie. Jeffrey DeMunn, who's always been a favorite of mine, to the point where he's recorded some of my books on tape. I love Thomas Jane, always have. FD: Bill Sadler, who played the Thomas Jane role in the audio book of "The Mist," god knows how many years ago. SK: It's amazing. And Marcia Gay Harden. So what's not to like… for me? Q: You talked about the sort of limited budget that you worked with here. Do you have an affection for films that are based on economy, and getting as much as you can out of that? FD: Yeah, absolutely. In fact, I was anxious to embrace that aesthetic. Some of my all–time favorite movies in the genre, the most muscular things, "Night of the Living Dead," for example— SK: "Night of the Living Dead" FD: —came out of very limited resources. There's some muscularity to that sometimes that you can capture. SK: Like "Texas Chainsaw Massacre." FD: Yes, absolutely. SK: Like Joe Bob Briggs used to say, "The Texas critic ain't nothing better than 'Saw'." FD: Joe Bob. SK: Joe Bob, yeah. FD: I haven't seen him in years. No, I really wanted to embrace that aesthetic because I felt that this had a real ballsy muscularity. I would have to say, to categorize "Shawshank" as a different kind of story for you, I would dispute that because the commonality here is Stephen King never lets you down in terms of writing a muscular, human story. Whatever the trappings, whatever the settings are, whatever the specifics of the story are, it comes from that storytelling muscle, which is why I think this guy single-handedly took horror out of the ghetto of literature and put it into the mainstream. I have said, you never saw grandmas in an airport lounge reading a horror novel until Stephen King came along and brought the story telling values of a real writer to the genre and elevated it. And we have him to thank for that. SK: I try to put real people in stories. I would like to be able to do that, to put real people who are not clichés. I'd like some texture in my stuff, you know, and Frank has always respected that. This is a movie you could categorize as a horror movie. I never tell anybody what to do about that. Call it whatever you want to, but please, they're real people in that supermarket, and you get a real sense of human people. And it's not "Friday the 13th part 6." It's got a more texture than that. Q: I'm curious about the role of the military in "The Mist." FD: The role of the military is incidental. The role of the creatures, honestly, is incidental. To me it's all context for the story that's being told which is that super heated character ensemble of people who are getting the hell scared out of them and colliding like pinballs. I mean, that's the physics of the story that Steve set in motion, and that's what really attracted me to it. It's that what happens when the thin veneer of civilization is laid aside, and people are scared, and they lose their reason, and their ability to have a rational conversation. It makes it pretty timely, it makes it pretty relevant. It also makes for just damn good storytelling. That's why I always loved the story. SK: When I was writing the story, it certainly crossed my mind. It isn't even a conscious thought. It's almost like something that's gone through and been absorbed into your imagination and your subconscious, is the idea that we're all sort of puppets. There are a lot of people fooling around with a lot of things, and we don't have any say in a lot of cases. Apparently, AT&T and some of these other companies were listening in people's phone calls long before it started to be a political issue. They have that technology, and they can do it. We couldn't very well call it the collateral damage market, but in a sense you know, there's something going on, and these people are not responsible for it. They're, would you say, caught in the middle. FD: Yeah, well, the reasonable people are always caught in the middle, caught in the middle of a lot of machinations, and a lot of which I'm sure we don't know about. That makes me paranoid, and who was it that says sometimes we're not paranoid enough. I think that's probably true. SK: You're not paranoid if they really are after you. FD: And they are, Steve, they're after you. SK: But I have my tin foil hat, Frank. Takes care of a lot of things. FD: I'm wearing my tin foil underwear right now. It's a lacy little number, and you're receiving signals from somewhere. Sorry [laughs]. Q: How would you say your writing has evolved over the years? Has your writing gotten more angry or softer over the years? SK: First thing that crossed my mind when you said how's my writing evolved, I say probably I know two or three thousand more words than I did when I was 24, so my vocabulary's improved a little bit. No, I'm not as angry as I used to be, because I'm not 25 anymore, I'm sixty. That'll kick your ass every time. There's an Elvis Costello song that says "I used to be angry now I'm just amused," or something like that. And I'm not amused, but there's a little more despair in some of the works than there used to be. In that sense, "The Mist" is actually a fairly mature work in that it's darker than some of the other stuff. I'm still just trying to tell good stories, and find a way to do that and not repeat myself, and not fall into a rut and furnish it, and find new ways to do things. And I guess that's it. FD: Well, he's getting less angry as he gets older. I'm getting more and more pissed off. I always had this sunny optimist in me. He's just getting a little beat up lately. You know, when I was younger I always had this notion that we can pretty much work anything out. But I've realized as I get older that that takes some goodwill on the part of the people who are doing the talking, or not doing the talking, as the case may be. And it's just making me kind of angrier. SK: If you get his emails… FD: Oh yeah, oh yeah, I'll rant. I'll rant on occasion. I don't think there's anything we can't work out, but we seem to be determined not to. And in a way that kind of feeds back into "The Mist" as a story. I'm clinging to hope, but it's not the easiest thing in the world to do. I'm stuck in the middle of that argument that Tim Robbins and Morgan Freeman had at the mess hall table: is hope a good thing or is it just stupid? |