Stephen King is a big 'softie,' and 'Life of Chuck' showcases his joyful side
Mike Flanagan has gone to the movies with Stephen King twice in his life.
When Flanagan adapted King’s “The Shining” sequel “Doctor Sleep” in 2019, he screened it early for King in an empty Maine movie theater near the author’s Bangor home and “it was probably deeply uncomfortable for both of us,” Flanagan says. “He happened to love the movie, but I was staring at him the whole time, just microanalyzing everything.”
Years later, when the writer/director made a cinematic version of King’s novella “The Life of Chuck” (in theaters nationwide June 13), Flanagan just sent him an online screening link. “He loved it. And then kept asking to see it again,” the filmmaker recalls. “We kept refreshing Steve's link. By the sixth or seventh time, I'm like, ‘He really loves this movie.’”
So much so that it led to the second time they watched a movie together, with a thousand other people for the "Chuck" premiere last year at Toronto International Film Festival. The buzzy film won the fest’s prized audience award − a harbinger of Oscar consideration, considering that the past 12 winners all nabbed best picture nominations – and has earned critical acclaim (80% fresh on Rotten Tomatoes).
It's also the rare King movie that, instead of a nightmare scenario, is the life-affirming tale of a seemingly ordinary accountant (Tom Hiddleston). Flanagan kept the author's unconventional three-act structure, told in reverse chronological order, that features the end of the world, an impromptu dance sequence and Chuck’s formative kid years.
Usually, King’s main characters are introduced having to deal with some sort of trauma, horror and/or supernatural clown. Our man Chuck comes alive one warm Thursday afternoon when the businessman hears a busking drummer.
“He puts his briefcase down and starts to move his hips to the beat of those drums,” Hiddleston says. “And something remarkable happens and all of his interior joy explodes out of it.”
The scene expresses “something really profound,” the actor adds, “which is that as we get older, perhaps our lives seem to reduce, but we still contain those infinite possibilities that we understood as children.”
The dance is King’s favorite: Flanagan reports that the author frequently revisits that bit during his "Chuck" viewings. At King’s core, “he’s a softie that loves people,” adds Kate Siegel, Flanagan’s wife, who plays Chuck’s English teacher in the movie. “He also loves to destroy you and kill off your favorite characters."
The key to making a Stephen King movie: It's all about humanity
Like many of the iconic author’s Constant Readers, Flanagan has watched his share of bad Stephen King movies over the years. He freely admits that 2017's “The Dark Tower” movie was one of them. (He's working on turning King's fantasy series into a TV show.) “When I saw ‘Dreamcatcher’ opening day, I was like, ‘What happened?’ ” he says.
A lot of filmmakers struggle to understand King's work, but Flanagan inherently gets it, as does Frank Darabont (“The Shawshank Redemption”) and Rob Reiner (“Stand By Me”): “He’s not writing horror even when he is writing horror,” Flanagan says. “He's an optimistic humanist and he's writing about love and humanity.”
For example, “Pet Sematary” is “the scariest book I've ever read in my life,” Flanagan says. But “if you're making a movie about zombies coming back reanimated by a cemetery, you're making the wrong movie. If you're making a movie about how a parent could never resist the chance to save their child, then you're making the right movie.
“What always leaps out to me is, what is he really talking about here? Because if you say ‘The Shining’ is about a haunted hotel, and you don't say ‘The Shining’ is about alcoholism, you've missed it.”
King is “someone with enormous courage in exploring corners of life that some of us might be too frightened to explore,” Hiddleston adds. But Flanagan smartly “doesn't pigeonhole Stephen King. He sees King's breadth and range.”
'The Life of Chuck' brings together two guys with big hearts
Of King’s more than 60 novels – plus many short stories and novellas – Mark Hamill figures he’s read at least 40. (Currently, he’s deep into King’s “On Writing.”) For the "Star Wars" icon, who plays Chuck’s grandpa Albie, the magic of King’s prose is in the language.
“It's not like adjusting to the way Charles Dickens writes, or Mark Twain. He speaks the way we speak,” Hamill says. “You're comfortable in space and time and familiar with the characters. So when things do go wonky, he already has you in his grip."
King's writing is "timeless," says "Chuck" castmate Karen Gillan. "We're all dealing with different things at different stages of life, but ultimately, he's exploring emotions that we can all connect to."
When a new King book is released, Flanagan first digs in as a fan. “He’s always been such a visual writer that inevitably there's this imaginary movie that plays in your head when you read it,” he says.
With “Gerald’s Game,” Flanagan had that movie in his head for more than a decade before making it for Netflix. “Doctor Sleep” was “this incredible puzzle box” where he had to weave together conflicting aspects of King’s original “Shining” narrative and Stanley Kubrick’s classic movie, “and it was nauseating every day to try to navigate it,” he says.
And after being emotionally steamrolled by his first reading of King's "Chuck" novella – to the point of "tears on my cheeks" – Flanagan’s mission was simple: "Don't mess it up. It's about taking that beautiful story and just getting it up on the screen."