How Not to Eviscerate Stephen King
Adapter un best-seller à ses risques et périls.
Les chiffres sont aussi vertigineux que ses livres: Stephen King a plus d’une soixantaine de romans et des centaines de nouvelles à son actif. L’auteur américain est non seulement prolifique, mais il sait aussi faire recette. Ses oeuvres ne cessent d’être adaptées à la télévision et au cinéma, mais comment les cinéastes font-ils pour ne pas froisser le roi du frisson?
It started right away. As soon as Stephen King published his first novel, “Carrie,” in 1974, Hollywood came knocking. And it has never left his doorstep, not really. Every decade since, the movies and the TV shows kept com
ing. Some of them were great; some were fine; some were not either.
2. We are once again in a boom period for King adaptations. In addition to “Pet Sematary” in April, Netflix’s “In the Tall Grass” and the coming second season of Hulu’s ”Castle Rock,” the fall’s two biggest horror films are “It Chapter Two” and “Doctor Sleep.” The former has already scored the second biggest horror-movie opening weekend ever, and the latter — well,
the latter is only a sequel to one of the most obsessed-over scary movies of all time.
3. Based on King’s sequel to “The Shining,” which picks up with Danny Torrance as a grown man decades after his father went mad at the Overlook Hotel, “Doctor Sleep” will try to please aficionados of Stanley Kubrick’s beloved original as well as fans of the novel. In recent years, King has become vocal on Twitter with support for
adaptations of his work, but he has never abandoned his disdain for the Kubrick film.
4. Andy Muschietti, who directed both “It” films and Mike Flanagan, the “Doctor Sleep” director who also adapted the King novel “Gerald’s Game,” are just two members of a generation of writers, directors and producers who came of age reading King’s books and hold him in high esteem. In separate interviews, Muschietti and Flanagan spoke about what they have learned adapting King for the screen.
LESSON NO. 1: DON’T SKIMP ON THE CHARACTERS
5. FLANAGAN: So many of his stories demand a suspension of disbelief that’s pretty huge. He’s written about laundry machines coming to life and killing people. It can be really hilarious were it not for the attention he pays to his characters. One thing that tends to go wrong is that people who adapt King’s work prioritize the genre elements over the characterization. Understandably, they think, “I’m making a horror movie, I should focus on the scares” at the expense of character. I think what (King) does better than almost any of his contemporaries is approach his characters in a very warm, very empathetic manner, and the horror, when it works, is growing out of those characters and is there to test them.
6. MUSCHIETTI: King has such passion for digging into psychology. In “Pet Sematary,” after (the young boy) Gage gets hit by a truck, there’s a whole chapter that speaks about Gage growing up and becoming successful and all the girls are crazy about him and he goes to college, except none of that was true because Gage was actually dead. That blew my mind. You’re reading this and you’re like, “Why!” He understands human psychology so well; that sort of thinking is part of the grief and the inability to cope with that child’s death.
LESSON NO. 2: BEWARE THE TONAL SHIFTS
7. FLANAGAN: My approach has always been: Identify the overarching tone, and then from there you can wander into things that are lighter, that are a little more absurd, that can be warmer, colder, even brutal in moments. Andy did that really well with “It.” There are other movies like (2003’s) “Dreamcatcher” which, despite the incredible collection of talent (directed by Lawrence Kasdan, co-written by William Goldman and co-starring Morgan Freeman and Damian Lewis), made many missteps. They are playing all the notes from the book, but they’re playing them all over the keyboard. And movies just don’t have that freedom to go as far as the books do. On the page, King can play the whole orchestra, but he also has hundreds of pages to do it.
8. MUSCHIETTI: I think I learned storytelling from King and from watching films that were
adapted from his work. I learned that it is possible to mishmash a lot of different flavors and tones. Now, how you reach a balance of good taste and subtlety, that’s just something you learn on your own. It’s a matter of calibration.
LESSON NO. 3: APPRECIATE THE WORK
9. MUSCHIETTI: What makes (the movies) good is when there’s an element of love. Look at Frank Darabont and “The Shawshank Redemption.” That movie was made by a guy who loves the material. The first movies were executed by very good filmmakers. “Carrie” was Brian De Palma; “Christine” was John Carpenter; “The Shining” was Kubrick. The most memorable adaptations were carried out by filmmakers who had a voice and a strong vision. But then his books exploded, and suddenly everyone wanted to get their hands on his properties. “We bought this book. Let’s make a quick Stephen King movie.”
10. FLANAGAN: In the very beginning, with his adaptations, there was a sense of “we’re plucking these off the best-seller list, so clearly the movie will be successful.” But when you grow up reading him and watching adaptations going well and going south, you get protective. There is a profound difference to how people of my generation will approach it than those were who making them in the ’80s.
LESSON NO. 4: BUT DON’T BE TOO LOYAL
11. MUSCHIETTI: The whole idea of adapting a story into a film is about translating it into a different language, and that language has its own exclamation points and question marks. When you adapt a book into a movie, the book is not always tense in the way you need it to be.
So you need to come up with new things, and you have to discard things that are not useful for cinematic escalation. The scene in “Chapter Two” where Pennywise bashes his head against the fun house wall, for example, was not in the book, but there wasn’t a scene that gave you that kind of anxiety at that point in the story. The structure of the book is fascinating. But you think you’re catching a rhythm, and then it’s interrupted by Mike Hanlon’s interludes. Or it goes back to 1958, and you get this really experiential section that goes into each character and their minds. If you adapted the book with that same structure, it wouldn’t be a very interesting cinematic experience.
12. FLANAGAN: My whole pitch for the movie hinged on the Overlook Hotel, which burns down at the end of the novel but is still standing at the end of the film. In (“Doctor Sleep”), King makes it so clear out of the gate that he’s ignoring the Kubrick film. And while I’m such a Stephen King fan, as someone who had experienced the Kubrick film at a young age and had been influenced by it in a really profound way, it was really difficult to reconcile this schizophrenic experience. All of the visual language I associate with the characters and with the Overlook Hotel was Kubrick’s language, but all of the characterizations and story lines were King’s. “The Shining” might not be a very good adaptation of the book, but you can’t argue that it isn’t a masterpiece of cinema and that it’s defined how an entire generation views horror. My argument to King was that if we’re going to be revisiting the world of Dan Torrance and of the Overlook, we’re kind of obliged to do so in the language that the world knows. And like it or not, that language was Kubrick’s. His initial reaction was no, he did not want to go back into the world of Kubrick. But the more I was able to explain to him how I was going to do it he said, “OK, under those circumstances, go for it.” Had he not endorsed that, I wouldn’t have done the movie. There was no upside for me to be part of yet another adaptation set within the world of the Overlook Hotel that was going to upset Steve.
“The whole idea of adapting a story into a film is about translating it into a different language, and that language has its own exclamation points and question marks.”