Quote:
With OUIJA: ORIGIN OF EVIL ready for its October release, director Mike Flanagan is confident that his long-mooted adaptation of Stephen King’s novel GERALD’S GAME will get off the ground next. And he’s committed to doing right by the book—about a woman left handcuffed to a bed in a remote cabin after a sex romp with her husband goes awry—knowing that the track record of King movies has been the definition of uneven.
“Stephen King has been my hero since I was a child,” Flanagan tells RUE MORGUE, “and one of the things about being a fan of his is that I’m used to the familiar heartbreak of seeing his film adaptations and feeling like something’s gone off, and that the source material I love so much has not translated properly—with obvious exceptions. It’s just that for every SHAWSHANK or GREEN MILE or STAND BY ME, you’ve got…the others, that really hurt! It’s very important for me, as a fan, not to end up in that pile. I loved GERALD’S GAME from the minute I put it down; I had gooseflesh all over my arms and my neck when I finished it, and I remember just exhaling and saying, ‘I want to make this into a movie—and it’s unfilmable!’ [laughs] and shaking my head, thinking, ‘If I could crack this, this could be one of the greatest King adaptations of them all.’ ”
Flanagan’s involvement with GERALD’S GAME (which he scripted with his regular collaborator Jeff Howard) was first announced in 2014, shortly before he began working on a secret project that turned out to be the superior stalker film HUSH. That movie’s great success as a Netflix premiere earlier this year, the director says, has helped push GERALD’S GAME closer to fruition. “I view HUSH, actually, as my most successful movie,” Flanagan says. “All of Netflix’s numbers are proprietary, so I don’t get to look at them, but the way I’ve heard people talking, it’s been viewed an amazing number of times, and the reception has been very, very positive. Coincidentally, Stephen King watched HUSH at home on Netflix and tweeted about it, which kind of blew my mind. And that got us talking about GERALD’S GAME again.
“If you know the source material,” he continues, “you’ll know there are a lot of challenges inherent in that story. Not so much the narrative challenges of how to adapt it; it took me 10 years of constantly thinking about the book to crack the cinematic version. But it’s a real challenge for financiers and distributors, who say, ‘Yeah, we love your work, we love Stephen King, but this story, this particular story? We don’t know how it works,’ without reshaping it to fit a much more conventional structure, which I did not want to do. And Netflix, because of how well HUSH has done, said, ‘We’re really interested in this, and we’d like to do it the way you want to do it.’ And that eliminated the pressure of having to test-screen the movie and define the demographic that’s going to watch it—all of that stuff that typically comes into the conversation when you’re trying to figure out how to market a film for a wide theatrical release. It just cleared the table, so that I can make the movie I want to make. I’m hoping very much that we can get that movie up on its feet soon.”
As of now, Flanagan (who hasn’t heard any updates on when his horror/fantasy BEFORE I WAKE, which recently got bumped out of its fourth release date, will hit theaters) isn’t sure how involved King himself will be in the GERALD’S GAME feature. “That’s going to be entirely up to him. From what I’ve heard, sometimes he’s very involved when it comes to approvals and things like that, and sometimes he can be more hands-off. So I guess that remains to be seen. I would personally want him to be as involved as he possibly wants to be. And I think the more Stephen is involved, the more he’ll see the reverence that I have for this book. I would love for him to be part of this, and I hope he will be.” Keep your eyes here for further updates on GERALD’S GAME.