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THE MIST PRESS CONFERENCE REPORT
The relationship between Stephen King and Frank Darabont started with a dollar and has become over the past twenty five years a near flawless translation from King’s word to Darabont’s visuals. Beginning in 1982 when Darabont paid one dollar to adapt THE WOMAN IN THE ROOM, King’s personal favorite from his “Dollar Project,” Darabont gained fame as a screenwriter for hire before striking gold in his directorial debut with THE SHAWSHANK REDEMPTION in 1994, earning seven Oscar nominations and is currently the second best film of all time on the Internet Movie Database. Darabont followed that with an adaptation of King’s THE GREEN MILE, starring Tom Hanks. The film earned four Oscar nominations including Best Picture. Now, Darabont has returned to the world of Stephen King with his first feature length horror adaptation of King’s work, this time with THE MIST, based on King’s novella published in 1980 about a group of people trapped inside a supermarket as an eerie mist containing strange creatures covers the town. Even though the mist contains monsters, it is the actions and alliances formed by those trapped that provide the real terror of the film. Darabont had optioned the story for several years and in 2007, THE MIST became a reality, made under the banner of the Weinstein Company and Dimension Films.
“The Vietnam War was
over at the time I wrote it,” recalled King. “A friend of mine, Kirby
McCauley, was putting together an anthology called DARK FORCES and wanted
all these original stories from people who wrote in the genre. I told
Kirby I didn’t think I could do it because I’m blocked, I’m not writing
anything. I had finished three books, CARRIE, SALEM’S LOT, and NIGHT
SHIFT, and I was stuck. I happened to be at a little town market and I
looked at the front windows and I thought ‘If something bad happened,
those windows would fall in,’ because that’s the way I think. It’s not
necessarily a good thing but it’s a very profitable thing. This story came
out of it.” King also addressed the film’s political and religious overtones that the film and the novella both address and whether or not these bear any significance to his own personal beliefs. “I don’t want to go out and make political statements,” said an adamant King. “I’m a storyteller. Frank’s a storyteller, that’s what we do. I’ve said before and I’ll say again that if you’re trying to do your best work, these things are going to come up. They are going to become part of the story and people are going to ask questions about it. Is THE MIST a political story? Is THE MIST a story that has to do with the dangers with fundamentalist religion? Is THE MIST a story about red versus blue? I’m not going to answer those questions. You go see the movie and those questions will come up in discussion. If it serves as a springboard, then that’s great.” Darabont offered his response on the many subtexts in the film. “First law of physics, radiation makes good monsters.” When friends of King have made films based on his work, King is known to lend a cameo role in the film or be involved with the production. For THE MIST, he wasn’t and his answer as to why is very simple. “I was writing a book, that’s the short answer to that,” laughs King. “I do regret not acting in the film because Frank wanted me to play a role.” The role was that of a biker trapped in the supermarket who volunteers to go outside the mist. The role went to Brian Libby, who has appeared in all of Darabont’s films to date, including THE WOMAN IN THE ROOM. With all the humor
aside, the conference took a turn back to the roots of horror with a
question on what both King and Darabont’s greatest fears were. “People,”
replies Darabont. “Check out the 21st century so far, I’m afraid it’s
going to make the 20th look like the Romper Room. There’s nothing that
scares me more than what people are capable of when they are influenced by
a lack of reason. That’s what scares me.”
King was more specific on his fears. “I’m afraid of everything, it shows in my work.” He did agree with Darabont’s response on being fearful of people. “Every night when I go to bed and nobody popped a rogue nuke somewhere in the world, I feel this combination of I don’t believe we escaped this day and gratitude because we did escape another day. I wrote so many things like that from THE STAND to THE MIST. There are a lot of people out there, they’re afraid, they’re angry because fear and anger go hand in hand. When they do come together, there’s always someone with an answer. Whatever religion it happens to be, they will say “We have the only answer so let’s get down on our knees and pray on it and on your way out, there’s guns in the basement. I’m not saying THE MIST is about those things because that’s for you to decide. To a degree, THE MIST is about big bugs too.” King was asked about
the feeling of having movies based on his work as some of the best horror
films this year. “Well, I think it’s good to see my movies back, they’ve
been in rehab for a while.” With any adaptation from book to film, there are changes, and the most controversial change to THE MIST was Darabont’s decision to bring the story to a conclusion rather than the open ending in King’s novella. Sure to be talked about for quite some time, King shared his thoughts on Darabont’s change. “I loved it,” says King. “It puts a button on the story. I thought about this when I wrote the story. You can see that Frank was very faithful to the story. When Frank and I would talk about THE MIST, he would always tell me that it had to have a strong ending. It was a way of saying that the story, and I wouldn’t say it was a weak ending, but it was one that my late mother wouldn’t respect and you were kind of left to make up your own mind. Frank came up with an ending to the movie that I thought was terrific on the page. The only time that I wavered even slightly was when I actually saw it. I said to myself that this is so shocking that there ought to be ads in the newspaper that say if you reveal the last five minutes of this movie, you will be hung by the neck.” King also heaps praise for Darabont on the film and makes a point about today’s state of horror films. “THE MIST was made by an adult and not, I’m not going to say any names, but it isn’t part of the Splat Pack, young guys who haven’t quite come to a realization yet that this is serious as any other genre. It has a wonderful, realistic look that I was just crazy about.”
When asked which would be the next book by King that Darabont would like to adapt, even King himself was interested in the answer: “That’s a good question, better be thinking about that,” King tells Darabont. “The weirdest story Mr. King, or should I say Mr. Bachman, ever wrote that I’d love to adapt was THE LONG WALK. This was in the shadow of Vietnam?” “I started that in 1967,” recalls King. Having just turned 60 and being that his stories are laced which such darkness, is King still an angry man? “I’m not as angry as I
used to be because I’m not 25 years old anymore, I’m 60. I’m still just
trying to tell good stories and not trying to repeat myself, just finding
ways to do things,” says King. “Well, he’s getting less angry, I’m getting more and more pissed off,” says Darabont. “There’s still the sunny optimist in me, he’s just getting a little beat up lately. When I was younger, I had this notion that we could work anything out. As I’ve gotten older I’ve realized that it takes some good will on the part of the people doing the talking, or not doing the talking as the case may be. I don’t think there’s anything we can’t work out, but it just seems that we’re not willing to. I’m stuck in the middle of that argument that Andy and Red have at the table, is hope a good thing or a bad thing? I’m directly in the middle.” When asked about whether he’d direct another film (his only film was MAXIMUM OVERDRIVE), King had a surprising answer. “I’d never say never, I think it’d be great to direct a movie where I wasn’t coked up or drunk out of my mind and see what came out,” to a round of laughter. “I’m not crazy to do it though.” The last question of the day went to a familiar question asked in the halls of the Crypt, on what King thinks of the current state of horror in reference to his earlier comment on the Splat Pack. “I’m not dissatisfied with the Splat Pack, I’m anxious to see P2. I was excited to see the remake of HALLOWEEN. It’s like every other kind of movie, there’s some that I like and there’s some that I don’t. In a lot of cases, it feels to me that I’m not dealing with reality, that I’m dealing with some sub genre where it feels like a Japanese no play, I feel like I know what’s going to happen. You know this is going to happen and that is going to happen and it’s going to have a SIXTH SENSE snapper at the end of it. A lot of times they don’t feel like the work of grown ups, they feel like the work of people who are still learning to tell a more textured story.” As King was stating this, Darabont nodded his head in approval (Darabont answered this in a roundtable conducted the day before). After the conference, both King and Darabont were off to the New York premiere, thanking all the media for attending, and concluding a long weekend for the director, its cast, and the various media outlets covering this event. THE MIST opens in theaters on November 21st.
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On November
12, 2007, nine days before the release of the film, King made a rare
public appearance to support THE MIST and its director Darabont at a press
conference. The sixty year old King appeared jovial in support of the film
and joined Darabont, who seemed at times a fan himself in awe of the
“master of horror.” The two reacted to each other like old friends sharing
war stories palling around. The origins of THE MIST was first discussed
where being that THE MIST does seem very topical for today despite the
fact it was published in 1980, was the MIST written during the Vietnam
conflict?
