Chatting about THE LIFE OF CHUCK

When did you first read Stephen King’s novella ‘The Life of Chuck,’ and what made you want to bring it to the screen?

I first read the novella in April of 2020 as an advanced copy before the book was published. Stephen King had sent it out to a bunch of different producers, production companies and filmmakers, as he typically does, to gauge interest. I was completely bowled over by its message and its joy and its complexity and its structure, which I thought was fascinating. I cried the entire time reading it.

Honestly, I had never read anything like it. Not from Stephen King, not from anyone before. I emailed King that day and said, “If I could have a crack at this story, it might be the best movie I’ll ever make.” He had just given me the rights to Dark Tower and his response at the time was, “Let’s focus on Dark Tower and if this comes back around, I’ll let you know.” But for years after that, I obsessed over the story and I would tell anyone who would listen that if I could make the movie that was in my head, it would be the best film I’ve ever made.

When I got back in touch with Stephen last year to give an update on the Dark Tower, I asked again about The Life of Chuck and this time he said, “You know what? Let’s go for it.” And the rest is history.

This film marks your fourth adaptation of a Stephen King novel following Gerald’s Game, Doctor Sleep and the upcoming Dark Tower series.  What are the biggest difficulties associated with adapting the work of such an iconic author and do you feel a certain amount of pressure to get it right?

It is always a challenge for me on a number of levels, including a very personal one because Stephen King is my favorite author, and my literary hero. So letting him down on an adaptation would be devastating to me.

Also, as a constant reader and as a fan of King my whole life, I’ve been on the roller coaster of watching so many of his works be adapted, and have experienced the incredible highs and lows that you have as a fan watching his work be translated to the screen. And so I’m also very conscious about letting the Stephen King community down and making the kind of movie that I wouldn’t enjoy as a fan. So there’s always a lot of pressure. This is my third Stephen King movie. And I felt the same pressure with Gerald’s Game and with Dr. Sleep, both of which were kind of considered to be very high level of difficulty adaptations. This was no different. It’s a challenging story to adapt regardless. But the pressure is always there and I feel an incredible amount of responsibility to protect the experience that I had when reading King’s work and to honor my hero and to make something that he’ll be proud of.

While it certainly has elements of fear and grief surrounding death, the film still feels very hopeful and life-affirming. Can you talk about the overall tone of the film that you so delicately strike here?

One of the great surprises for me reading the story was just how incredibly life-affirming and hopeful the overall tone was. In many ways, it lept off the page as a true celebration of joy and of art. And when I first began reading it I was reacting to this story about the end of the world and feeling a lot of the emotions that certainly, since the pandemic, have really come to the foreground for so many of us. A feeling like the wheels have come off and the chaos is increasing. And feeling like one thing after another just seems to catastrophize. All of that was there, but without any despair and without any cynicism, and that was the starting point for a story that ultimately revealed itself to be an incredibly joyful celebration of what it means to be alive. You know not to dwell on the endings, but to celebrate the moments that we get to experience between our beginning and our end and to understand how our lives come together and make sense when we look back on them. Not to fear the ending of things, whether it’s the end of life or the end of the world. The story doesn’t draw much of a difference. The ending of a single human being in King’s story is the end of a universe entire and that is even something not to be feared in his story.

It’s rare, especially from an author so well known for his horror, to read something that was so full of light and so full of hope. And at the time I was reading it in lockdown in 2020, when the pandemic was brand new, and when there was kind of no visibility into when we would be released from our homes, and there was a sense that the world was falling apart. This message hit me in a place where I really needed it and I had no idea that I needed it. And what amazes me is that it’s just as resonant today where it still feels like the wheels are off and the chaos runs rampant.

More than ever, stories like this are critical. My entire mission in the movie was to present the realities of the stakes that exist in Chuck’s life and in this story, but to do so without despair and without cynicism. And to underscore all of the beautiful things that King had to say about life and art. I’ve never worked on something more joyful. I’ve never worked on anything like this – a movie that does not have one ounce of cynicism. I wanted so badly for it to exist in the world for my children. This is a movie I wanted them to be able to find in their lives when they might need it. And because it’s especially a new thing for me. I wanted to protect that swelling in my heart that I felt when I read it.

Both the film and the novella really seem to subvert expectations of what a Stephen King story and a Mike Flanigan project should be and what audiences may initially expect from each of you respectively. Talk about that:

If you look at Stephen King’s body of work, particularly titles like The Shawshank Redemption and The Green Mile, he has always exhibited an incredibly humanistic approach to storytelling and has straddled a lot of genres beyond just horror, even though that is primarily what he is known for. In my own work, I’ve existed entirely within the horror genre for my whole professional career, but what he and I have in common is a deep love for human beings.

King has famously said that what separates his horror from his contemporaries is that horror in his stories cannot exist without love, and cannot exist without hope. His constant readers know this. We feel the beauty, even in the darkest of his novels. King has always had his heart in his work and I can think of a few examples where it doesn’t quite make it to the screen in an obvious way. Yet, with CHUCK,  I can’t think of a single other story he’s ever written in which that joy, that heart, that earnestness and that humanism is as foregrounded in the story as this one.

We are certainly both venturing far outside of our expected lanes, which has only made it more important for me to try to make it as clear as I can that this is not a horror film, and to try to work against those expectations as people find their way to the movie. The genre doesn’t matter as much as the message and the characters and in this case, those hits close to my heart. I read his story, and I felt the way I felt when I first watched Kurosawa’s Ikuri or Rudy or Searching for Bobby Fischer,  It’s a Wonderful Life… you know,… movies that feel profoundly uncynical and beautiful and life affirming. And it’s an honor to be able to kind of walk with Steve on this road that is less traveled by us generally.

The film has such an incredible ensemble cast, many of whom you have worked with on previous projects.

One thing I think is really neat about the film is that it really represents a fascinating mix of actors who I’ve worked with throughout my career, along with incredible new faces. There are actors here who I’ve worked with eight to nine times before. They’re actors who I first worked with when they were children, like Jacob Tremblay and Annalise and with whom there’s a really palpable kind of familial bond.

Talk about the decision to tell the story in three parts, backwards over time

One of the things I loved the most about the short story was the structure. Our lives only truly make sense when we look back at them. He embraced this beautiful three act structure in the novella, which, you know, movies have been employing a three act structure since pretty much the beginning of film entertainment. And so this was a wonderful opportunity to protect the structure he created, that translated so cleanly to the medium that I was working in. It was apparent to me immediately that I wanted to do exactly what he did, and that there were other opportunities within that structure to play even more and to make visual and thematic connections between these three chapters that you can’t do in a book because of the visual nature of our medium. It’s a structure I adore. I found it to be unexpected and incredibly poetic. The story is the same if told the other way if told linearly, but the impact and the meaning are diminished. And I think that’s because the impact of our lives takes on a whole other level when viewed retroactively when looked back upon.

What is the best memory you have of making this film and how did Tom Hiddleston’s big dance scene come together?

This project is among my favorite experiences on a set in my entire career. First of all, I have so many beautiful memories of this shoot, being back in Alabama where my career began as my fifth movie shooting there with a lot of the same crew who were there for Oculus when my career has started, the same actors. So Annalise Basso and Karen Gillan, you know we’re in that movie playing the same character. And then here they are, again, there was an enormous amount of feeling of Homecoming in making the film. But I have to say, the first four days of our shoot, we’re filming the midpoint dance sequence with Tom Hiddleston, Annalise Basso and Pocket Queen on the Drums. And we knew that we were starting with one of the most critical sequences of the entire film. But those four days that it took to film that sequence were amazing onset, and I recall that my face physically hurt at night when I came back to the hotel from smiling so much during the day, watching Tom and Annalise and PQ (which was call Taylor “the Pocket Queen”) was watching them perform that dance, which they would do from beginning to end.

As we continue to find our coverage, and the entire time watching that five and a half minute routine. It was just as joyful to see on Thursday as it was on Monday. I’ve never been part of a sequence like that. I’ve never been on set for something like that. It was blissful. And well it was still very difficult and we dealt with all the stuff you deal with on any films set and had to cut because the sun went behind a cloud or because we were wrangling 150 backgrounds to fill it and that became tough. It had all the headaches, but they were thoroughly eclipsed by the joy of watching, watching that dance. And when I think about this movie that will always be the foreground image for me of what the life of Chuck is.

We felt at times, you know, we made we shot that whole week, which is the entire second act of the movie. And then it was like the movie ended because all of those actors went home. And suddenly we had a new cast and a new directive. And we would say, well, it feels like we’re starting a new film. It’s like we just wrapped a complete movie with Tom Hiddleston. And he’s back on a plane and Chiwetel is just landing to start and then we have to tell this other story about the end of the world or we have to go tell this other story about Ben Payjack and Mark Hamill and Mia Sara, in childhood. And it was really, especially after working in television for the last five years where you’d set these 100 Day shoots for one long story to out an entire act of the movie and feel like we finished a story every week and a half. It was crazy. 

What was your biggest challenge during production and how did you overcome it?

One of the biggest challenges of this movie is absolutely having to consider and juggle these three distinct stories that make up one much larger story. They each have a completely different cast. They each have a completely different aesthetic down to the aspect ratio of the film. They each have a completely different visual approach, different tones and different narrative priorities. But they have to come together to paint one picture of a life and to paint one clear message, keeping all of that together and navigating the cast, the crew and the logistical difficulties of a low budget independent movie, especially shooting last fall. Amid all of the turmoil in the industry, there were a lot of challenges. There was always a belief, though, that this film was special, and I heard that echoed from the crew, from the cast. You know, everyone walked into this with their eyes wide open about what the challenges would be, and we’re eager to meet them daily.

We were a SAG interim agreement movie. Yeah, we couldn’t change the script. The script was locked prior to the WJ strike. And yeah, we had to get the permission of the unions to shoot the film because we were completely independent. They were very supportive of us. It was an insane time to make a movie.

What do you hope audiences take away from The Life of Chuck?

I hope audiences take away some of the joy that is inherent in the story. I hope it helps them look at our world today, at the challenges of each of our individual lives, and encourages them to sometimes put down the briefcase and let yourself dance, whatever that means to you, whatever kind of expression of joy dancing represents, you know, whether that’s painting or just being with family, writing, being athletic, you know, all these different ways that we can let our hearts out. I hope that’s what they take away. This movie certainly gave me a lot of peace and joy and hope and affirmation, and if I can give our audience a fraction of what I felt, then this would have been absolutely worth it.