Director Mike Flanagan, who made the horror films Oculus and Hush, has told the Shock Waves podcast that he wants to tackle a film in the planned Dark Tower franchise, which is based on Stephen King’s series of fantasy novels. Filmmaker Nikolaj Arcel (A Royal Affair) is currently directing the first movie in the series in South Africa with a cast which includes Idris Elba and Matthew McConaughey.
“For me, The Dark Tower is a dream project,” Flanagan explained to Shock Waves hosts Rebekah McKendry, Rob Galluzzo, and Elric Kane. “My favorite [book] is number four. Wizard and Glass, I want it. But we’ll have to see.”
Flanagan also discussed at length his proposed adaptation of another King book, 1992’s Gerald’s Game.
“The big one that I’ve been pushing uphill now for a year-and-a-half, maybe longer, is… Gerald’s Game, which I got permission to do after Oculus came out,” said the director. “The rub with Gerald’s Game is, if you’ve read the book, it’s a woman and her husband go to their lakehouse, miles from anywhere, to kind of spice up their love-life. He handcuffs her to a bed, he promptly dies of a heart attack, and the woman is her handcuffed to the bed for days. So, it’s 127 Hours-meets-Gravity. But, when you talk about minimalism, this is a challenge. When I first read the book, I thought it was unfilmable and it took me 10 years to find a structure that I was like, ‘This will work.’ And so, Jeff [Howard, Flanagan’s Oculus cowriter] and I wrote the script, King loved the script, and we were all set to go. It’s just been a nightmare to try to get it up off the ground, because I can’t get people passed this idea that it’s a movie about a woman handcuffed to a bed.”
Flanagan revealed that the project could take flight at Netflix, which debuted Flanagan’s slasher movie Hush last April. “I thought the project was in danger of total stagnation for a while, and Hush really shook it awake again, because King loved Hush, and Netflix loved Hush, like Netflix loved the way it was performing. And so Netflix showed up and they were like, ‘You know what we have a lot of? Money. You know what we don’t have a lot of? [New] movies. You know, what we like to do is take risks on movies. It doesn’t matter to us if you don’t think you can get the movie into multiplexes. Hush worked. We’ve got you and Stephen King. Maybe we want to do it at a price-point that a studio wouldn’t.’ So, I don’t know if that’s happening and I don’t want to put the cart before the horse. But, yeah, the project is alive again because of that and so we’re having those conversations.”
You can her Flanagan talk more about his career, his forthcoming horror sequel Ouija 2, and his planned I Know What You Did Last Summer reboot, on the latest episode of Shock Waves.
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