Mike Flanagan's on a roll. He has been for some time. From his underseen debut, Absentia, to Ouija: Origin of Evil, the big-budget sequel that far, far surpassed the original, Flanagan has a knack for crafting some of the scariest, smartest horror out there.
Carla Gugino stars in what might be one of the great Stephen King adaptations of all time.
His winning streak continues with Gerald's Game, a horror-thriller adapted from the Stephen King book of the same name, in which Gerald (Bruce Greenwood) handcuffs his wife, Jessie (Carla Gugino), to the bed in a sex game during a romantic getaway. He promptly dies of a heart attack, and Jessie is left, chained to the bed, without any hope of escape. It's good, and all the more impressive for how, as a Stephen King adaptation, it was able to get significant hype despite It's release just a few weeks beforehand. The film is Flanagan's dream project, and now that that's out the way, it's hard to imagine what comes next won't be bigger, better, and even more brutal than his past work.
GQ: I read a rumor that you used to bring a copy of Gerald's Game to meetings, just in the wide-eyed hope that you might one day get to make it.
Mike Flanagan: That's absolutely true. It occurred to me when we were doing the final sound mix on the movie earlier this year that, "Wow, it's been half my life I've been carrying this movie around in my head trying to make it." It's a very surreal day that all of a sudden it's available to millions and millions of people. That's crazy. That's crazy! Right?
Whenever you take a general meeting, inevitably you run out of things to talk about, they'd always say, "What's your dream project?" I would always pull out Gerald's Game. If they knew the book, they'd say, "Well, that's unfilmable." If they didn't know the book it would take about 30 seconds of my pitch to say, "That's not a movie."
Then Netflix came along and helped things out.
Yeah. Netflix was after Hush and because of how well that did, they said, "What do you have that you're really excited about?" We gave it to them and kept expecting the response it's gotten a lot of times over the years, which is: "Love Stephen King. Very cool, but we need to make substantial changes to try to open this up into a much more 'cinematic experience.'"
All of the changes that you could make that would make a studio marketing department happy are all things that really have nothing to do with the source material. It was a relief that Netflix wanted to make the same movie we wanted to make.
It feels like the changes that you did make, with the ghost "Geralds" and "Jessies," seems like the easiest way to keep the spirit of the thing.
Yes, exactly. It let us take so much of the internal monologuing that Jessie does in the book, and put it up on its feet, put those wonderful words into someone's mouth.
The book would also bring in these other characters we never really met before, her old college roommate, her psychiatrist, this puritanical wife. That would have been a little theater-of-the-absurd, I felt, in a movie, considering that some of what the story was about. For me, it was about this marriage, and about Jessie and Gerald. It seemed really natural that even though he'd turned up dead, we'd still be with that marriage and kind of dissecting with them for the runtime. That's what really opened up the adaptation for me. That's what made me feel like it could be a movie.
Let's talk about Carla Gugino's performance. For long, long, sections, she's basically playing off herself in a dual role.
It was incredible to watch, even on the day. One of the most exciting things for me, after all of the discussion and rehearsals, was just sitting and watching the performance that Carla was crafting. From day one, it was hypnotic for me.
We structured filming unusually, too. You would bring the whole crew in. Carla and Bruce and I would rehearse the day's work, the whole day's work. That would mean Carla running the scene, one chained up to the bed, and then we'd put a stand-in in there. She would stand up, and we would perform the other side of the scene, go at it again.
Carla would be acting to her stand-in throughout the day. She always wanted to start the day as Jessie Two. She wanted to start it powerful, and made-up, and confident. Then after we finished shooting all of the Jessie Two material, we would change her into haggard Jessie and handcuff her to the bed, and she'd have to go do the whole day again. To see her keep track of those two arcs together was amazing.
I viewed it from the beginning as, we have these two versions of Jessie, and the movie's about the one on the bed turning into the other one, the one we see at the end in the courtroom.
Then you've got Bruce Greenwood. Sometimes he's the villain, sometimes he's almost kind of silly. Having fun.
Oh, yeah, and what was really interesting and respectful of Bruce, he would also work with Carla to craft his performance, because it was clear to us very early on that he only got to play Gerald for ten minutes, but once he dies, he's actually playing Jessie. There was a lot of discussion about where Carla thought Jessie was at that moment, and how she'd remember Gerald at that moment. Would he be aggressive? Would he be gentle even if he was saying horrible things?
There must have been a great pressure once It did so well, to come out with another Stephen King adaptation so soon.
Oh, yeah. When we were filming this movie, we had no clue that we would be releasing in the middle of an explosive Stephen King renaissance. As a King fan, I was thrilled and I thought, " Oh! They finally got It off the ground. I can't wait to see it." Then, "Ah, Mr. Mercedes, great." Then, "1922, cool!" It's wonderful as a fan. We didn't think we'd be coming out in the middle of the eye of the storm, but I think it's wonderful. I think it's very exciting, as a fan and as a viewer.
Are there any other Stephen King works that you would talk about adapting in the next few years?
There are... so many I would love a shot at. There's the big ones that I think everyone, any filmmaker who grew up on King, is lying if they wouldn't tell you they would run into the room and tap dance as hard as possible to get a crack at The Stand or Salem's Lot, both of which, as Peter said, are proceeding. They're on their way.
I've always wanted to take a shot at Pet Sematary. My favorite of his books, though, is Lissey's Story, which is not one of his most well known books, but I think it is one of his most beautiful. I am also in love with Dr. Sleep, which would be a blast if I could wrap my head around how to get through it without being completely devoured by Stanley Kubrick's shadow. I think I'll work on a King story again. I'm a fan first.
This is, in a few ways, probably a tough film to sell through the lens, literally, of a male director.
Oh, for sure. Carla made a huge difference in that; I definitely consider Carla as much of an author of this movie as I am. That issue was something that was on my mind. It was not on my mind 20 years ago when I put the book down and I said, "My god, I have to make this movie someday." That wasn't even really part of my thinking then. As it got closer and it looked more and more real, what it did more than anything was make me determined to do it as well as I could.
I do not have the female experience. I don't, and I strive to understand it, but I'll never truly be able to. I don't think any men will, really. Working on this film meant looking at uncomfortable things about myself and my world and about my culture and my society. If we can do that for anyone watching it, I think it's been a successful venture from my perspective. I hope that viewers take away the same powerful message from the material that I did. Stephen's ideas were so ahead of his time and they resonate just as clearly, if not more so, now. I'm hoping that they still resonate, regardless of who's sitting in the director's chair.
The ending of "Gerald's Game" the movie is very, very close to the one in the book. I think it's safe to say, even for King's fans, it's not everyone's favorite ending of his books.
[Laughs] You could say that. The ending of the book is incredibly polarizing among King devotees. I love the ending of the book. It gave me goosebumps when The Space Cowboy spoke to her in the courtroom. For the film, I knew that I wanted to protect as much of the intention of the book as possible. We wanted to make small changes. We wanted to look at Chaubert as a combination of all of the sickness and all of the diseased maleness that Jessie's been victim to throughout her life, all rolled up into the one tumorous character she could actually confront head-on.
The cast and I worked really hard on what that last moment in the courtroom would be. We had no idea what she was going to do when we filmed it. What she says to him in that moment, "You're so much smaller than I remember." It's the last line of the movie, but it's the first line that the young Jessie says, the first time we see her in the flashback when she's looking at the lake house. She says, "It's so much smaller than I remember." Her father, walking behind her says, "It's because you're bigger."
We felt like Jessie had earned that symmetry, to be able to turn around and take a decisive, emotional victory over all of this. I expected it to be polarizing. I expected there to be strong opinions on both sides. I took it as a badge of honor that we must have adapted the book faithfully enough that we're sharing the same complaints.
What was behind the decision to not use the Space Cowboy angle? Was it just a matter of, maybe it was a bit too goofy? Was it a licensing thing?
I didn't know how to get the song into it without playing the song. Totally, that felt false. We made the decision very early on that we didn't want there to be any music once the cuffs were on. We didn't want to hear music again until they were off. We always kind of thought of him as the Space Cowboy on set, but it was one of those combinations of words, that without the full context in the book and without hitting people with that song, which I thought would have just shaken us violently out of the tone we were very carefully trying to make, that it was better to just let it be the "Man in the Moonlight," and let the fans fill in that blank themselves.
I've been a fan of your work since Absentia, and outside of maybe Hush, I feel like you like your dark, bummer endings.
Oh, yeah. I do.
Gerald's Game obviously, needfully, eschews that.
One of the things that came out of the book for me, was that I was surprised by how inspired I was. I didn't want to lose that.
I always tend to tilt dark on an ending, because I feel like, especially with horror movies, those are the endings that don't evaporate. Those are the ones that stick with you. For this one, Jessie had burrowed so far into my heart at that point, and I think all of us, Carla would have killed me. If we didn't send her back out into her life victorious in this scenario, I don't know how we could have forgiven ourselves.