“You go from being a filmmaker who made a horror movie to someone who just does horror,” Flanagan says. “It’s very easy to get pigeonholed.” Photo / Washington Post
The ever-busy director and Stephen King whisperer returns to theatres after five years – and four TV shows – with The Life of Chuck.
There are three dresses and six types of blood.
Which best pairs with which? It’s more complicated than you might think, and it’s a question facing Mike Flanagan and his crew. They ask the angelically patient stand-in to change into yet another prom dress, so they can smear it – and her – in more blood.
They would really rather not use the pink one, since Brian De Palma used the colour in his version of Carrie, and Flanagan wants to zag for his eight-episode adaptation for Prime Video. But it’s increasingly clear that pink makes the red pop. On the blue and green gowns, the blood looks black.
They try a gooey mixture called Standard Red.
“We can give it a better name than standard,” Flanagan jokes to his crew. “We don’t do standard around here.”
His presence is proof. Most directors don’t spend much time, if any, in preproduction – particularly when they’re busy promoting another project by having a reporter follow them around.
But on this warm day in late April, he’s putting in another 12-plus hours that begin at a warehouse, where he camera-tests the bloody dresses with different materials for the windows of Carrie’s house, before heading out to rural western Canada to scout locations for the show.
This attention to – and perhaps obsession over – detail has made Flanagan one of the most lauded horror directors working today. It has also helped him become cinema’s Stephen King whisperer, expertly adapting several King stories: Gerald’s Game, Doctor Sleep (sequel to The Shining), soon Carrie and one day, maybe, The Dark Tower series.
The Dark Tower is expansive, and Flanagan imagines it as a seven-season show and two feature films. “I’ve read the scripts for the first few episodes of The Dark Tower, and they’re terrific,” King says. “He really gets it.”
What makes the 47-year-old director so effective isn’t simply his fastidiousness or his ability to scare, but his focus on the characters being scared. He’s known as a horror director, but the beating heart of his work – before it gets ripped out – is character study.
“He cares about the characters more than he does about the scares,” King says by phone. “The scares are sort of organic to the story.”
At the same time, “he’s not afraid of the scares. He’s not afraid of the sort of Cronenberg body horror,” King says. “The two things together resonate like two strings on the same guitar that are in tune. … The horror, which he doesn’t shy away from, and this tenderness.”
And although horror may be his first love, he’s ready to splash around in some other pools, ones that aren’t filled with blood. He believes The Life of Chuck, in wide release on June 13 and based on one of King’s non-horror stories, can open up that other pool.
The movie ostensibly stars Tom Hiddleston, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Karen Gillan, Jacob Tremblay and Mark Hamill – but it also stars no one, in part because of its construction. It tells a simple story of an entire life, and it’s unlike anything you’ve ever seen. The less you know about it, the better the experience will be – as the Toronto International Film Festival attendees can tell you. They gave it the People’s Choice Award last year.
“There’s an unfortunate tendency within the industry to look at filmmakers and say: ‘This is what they’ve worked in. This is the only thing they can work in.’ Especially with genre,” Flanagan says. “You go from being a filmmaker who made a horror movie to someone who just does horror. Stephen King gets the same treatment. A lot of people are surprised to remember that he wrote The Shawshank Redemption.”
“It’s very easy to get pigeonholed,” he says.
Flanagan was cursed with dreams of directing in the fourth grade, when he watched a VHS copy of Jaws, and the obsession with filmmaking clamped its teeth into him. With a military father and the television as a close friend, he was no stranger to movies but had never quite noticed the craft before.
“I started dissecting that movie,” he says, as he mostly ignores the bento-box lunch on his office desk, during an interview done in spurts throughout a masterfully multitasked day of preproduction.
He wanted to understand the techniques that made Jaws terrifying. “What is it about the John Williams score that was so upsetting? It’s two notes,” he says. “What is it about the way Spielberg filmed it that made it so thrilling? Why is it that I was so afraid of a creature I didn’t see for an hour?”
He studied it endlessly. The original. The letterboxed format. In a movie theatre. In Imax, in 3D.
“I’ve had the experience of seeing Jaws for the first time throughout my life,” he says. “Each was a revelation.”
He began mimicking it. In fifth grade, he staged a live-action version of Jaws from his porch on New York’s Governors Island. His mimicking then jumped to VHS, which he used to remake sequences from De Palma’s The Untouchables and King’s It, infused with his own stories.
His version of The Untouchables ends with Al Capone pulling out a grenade and Eliot Ness shooting the mobster’s hand off. The hand (a stuffed garden glove) hits the ground still holding the grenade, which detonates. He filmed the explosion by aiming his camera at the TV and filming part of the original movie.
“I learned editing that way,” Flanagan says. From the jump, he loved the problem-solving inherent in moviemaking. He couldn’t figure out how to play music continuously over cuts, a problem he solved by playing edited footage on his TV. He would then film his film while sitting with a CD player and hitting play and pause to have the music align.
Of course, then the film quality degraded. Another problem to solve.
“I loved it immediately: solving puzzles and trying to trick the eye of the viewer into believing that what we were putting up was real,” Flanagan says. In high school in Maryland, he used the school’s equipment to make short comedies to play on the closed-circuit TV station with the morning announcements.
He was hooked, but he felt stirrings of the lifelong anxiety that accompanies a job in the movies.
“I would say to my parents, ‘I want to be a moviemaker for a living,’” he says. “And they’d say, ‘That’s adorable, but you need to focus on having a real job.’”
A real job didn’t work. He tried, kind of. With vague threats of teaching history, he chose secondary education as his major at Towson University. The thoughts faded out the second he took a film class and admitted that he was fooling himself if he tried to do anything else. He quickly switched majors.
Diploma in hand, he swapped Maryland for California, renting a Glendale apartment with a bunch of classmates, sharing one car and no insurance among them.
Then he became an LA story, one that probably shouldn’t have a happy ending. He blasted through savings, took a job shooting and editing car commercials for local cable. Scored an editing job with the National Lampoon crew via Craigslist, then edited reality TV, all the while “living very precariously hand-to-mouth”. Some early credits include The Ladies of Demolition Derby, Million Dollar Listing Los Angeles and Untold Stories of the ER.
The other dreamers accepted defeat, left LA, built lives.
Not Flanagan.
“I was delusional,” he says. “You have to be. On the other side of it, you rewrite it as tenacity.”
Which is how he found himself editing two reality shows – one during the day and one at night – when he learned he was about to become a father.
With actual reality pounding down the door, he made the kind of pledge you see in heist movies: one last shot at a big score. If this film didn’t hit, maybe he would become a history teacher after all.
He wrote a script incorporating everything he had access to: namely, his apartment and a nearby tunnel. He raised $25,000 on a then-nascent Kickstarter and began filming. Courtney Bell, one of the actresses, was pregnant with their son. (“You can see the ticking clock right there,” he says.)
And he made his first horror movie, which debuted in 2011.
“I don’t know why it took me that long to try to make something in the genre that I love,” he says. “I kept trying to make American Beauty.”
Absentia wasn’t a rocket ship, but his career achieved liftoff. He kept his reality-TV jobs but also made Oculus, his 2013 second feature, which he worked on secretly until the day he left for prep. He claimed to go to doctors’ appointments so often, the brass at his 9-to-5 must have thought him terminal.
Flanagan has always stretched himself to the breaking point, putting in long days, not eating enough while drinking too much. When he pitched Netflix on 2018’s The Haunting of Hill House, his first show, he promised to direct all 10 episodes himself “with the kind of naivety you can only have if you’ve never done it”.
“It was way more work than I thought. I lost 40 pounds. I withered away to a skeleton by the end of it,” he says. “That show almost completely killed me. I said at the time I’d never do it all again.”
He did.
He has worked pretty much constantly since Absentia, always a step or two ahead, always afraid the work could be snatched away. Case in point: During preproduction for Carrie, he was fielding calls from another studio relaying notes for his upcoming entry into The Exorcist canon, which suggested that there are too many crosses (no word if there are too many priests) and too many exorcisms (there is one).
“There’s always been a panic with me that as quickly as this career showed up, it could go away,” Flanagan says. “The only way to combat that is to start working on the next thing before the current thing comes out.”
It might seem strange that someone with Stephen King’s blessing would ever feel panicked. “I would do anything for that guy, within limits,” King says. But even the horror maestro’s seal of approval doesn’t guarantee more work.
Flanagan first got into the King business with 2017’s Gerald’s Game. Based on King’s 1992 novel, the movie follows a woman who spends most of the movie handcuffed to a bed. He loved how it stripped away everything but the character. He loved that it was considered unfilmable.
King is his favourite author, and he carried the book around with him in Los Angeles. The concept – building suspense in one space – spoke to his strengths, honed by making films such as 2016’s Hush, a home-invasion movie following a deaf woman, all shot in and around one house.
He also knew King is harshly critical of adaptations of his work and rarely holds his tongue, and Flanagan clearly enjoys a challenge.
“I was completely petrified,” he says. “I had no access to him at all.”
King sent a fan note after seeing the finished film. It’s in the director’s office, framed.
Flanagan, seemingly determined to put himself in difficult situations, decided his next King adaptation should be Doctor Sleep, a sequel to The Shining.
It was another big jump in a career – and life – full of them. He got sober during production of the movie with the help of Rational Recovery, aka. RR, which he calls the “pirate version” of Alcoholics Anonymous. His relationship with King blossomed. It was the highest budget he’d had: around $50 million.
It was also a minefield. King famously hates Stanley Kubrick’s imagining of The Shining.
“My whole pitch was, ‘I’ll be as faithful to the book as possible, up until the end,’” Flanagan says, “where I think it’s a missed opportunity not to return to the Overlook Hotel, and the Overlook in my imagination is Kubrick’s.”
King originally said no, but Flanagan talked him into the idea by pitching a mirroring of the bartender scene from the original film, which hinted at the story’s true theme: alcoholism.
“I think, for me, it was the reason I wanted to make the movie,” Flanagan says. “And my wife [Kate Siegel], she’ll say that was the scene when she read the script that told her I was going to get sober. She knew before I did.”
Still, his goal was a near-impossible one: to please both King and the Kubrick estate. If he managed that feat, “the movie could crash and burn, and that’d be fine”.
“Lo and behold, Steve was thrilled, the Kubrick estate was thrilled, and the movie did bomb,” Flanagan says, then deadpans: “So, we got everything I wanted.”
He wouldn’t release another movie for five years.
“The Life of Chuck” is Flanagan’s favourite movie that he’s made, and it’s difficult to disbelieve him when he says he doesn’t think a studio would have ever funded it. Not only because it isn’t horror, but also because it isn’t a recognisable anything. In a good way.
“A collaboration between Mike Flanagan and Stephen King. You’re expecting the supernatural horror epic of all time,” Hamill says. “ … I was absolutely stunned at how atypical it was for both of them.”
There are dresses, in other words, but there is no blood. It’s a faithful adaptation of a King novella that tells the story of a life – backward. “Each part interlocks with the part before it,” King says.
The story begins with Act III, so the movie does too. It is, in parts, humorous and horrific, sanguine and sorrowful, beatific and beautiful. It contains the themes of Flanagan and of King: alcoholism. Regret. Striving. The supernatural and the banal, living side by side. It’s about “the wonder of life, the beauty of small moments”, Hamill says.
“The timing of this movie could not be better. It’s a really troubling, disturbing, unprecedented time in our country’s history,” Hamill adds. “This is beyond escapism. It’s almost therapeutic because it reaffirms life itself.”
And life itself can be simple.
Even if, sometimes, it gets a bit bloody.
The Life of Chuck opens in New Zealand cinemas on July 31.
New York Times: From movies and TV shows to music, the habit is no longer taboo.