Random Things that Stephen King Has Said About Movie Adaptations Of His Work (15 items)

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  (#7) The Green Mile

  • Tom Hanks, Gary Sinise, Sam Rockwell, James Cromwell, Michael Clarke Duncan, David Morse, Patricia Clarkson, Bonnie Hunt, Harry Dean Stanton, Graham Greene, Michael Jeter, William Sadler, Paula Malcomson, Barry Pepper, Jeffrey DeMunn, Doug Hutchison, Dabbs Greer, Bill McKinney, Brent Briscoe, Eve Brent, Philip Hawn, Scotty Leavenworth, Van Epperson, Bill Gratton, Rachel Singer, Ted Hollis, Brian Libby, Tommy Barnes, Gary Imhoff, Rai Tasco, Christopher Joel Ives, Garth Shaw, Robert Malone, Dono Langley, Gower Mills, Mack Miles, Edrie Warner, Rebecca Klingler, Dee Croxton, Bailey Drucker, James Marshall Wolchok, Evanne Drucker, Katelyn Leavenworth, Toy Spears, Tim Smith, Todd Thompson, David E. Browning, Bill Craddock, Dora Tate, Samual Tate, Christopher Greenwood

  The Green Mile is another King prison story, but is very different than The Shawshank Redemption. When inmate John Coffey (Michael Clarke Duncan) is brought into custody for the murder of two young girls, Paul Edgecomb (Tom Hanks) and his fellow guards notice that he is able to perform healing miracles that lead them to question his guilt.

  King loved director Frank Darabont's adaptation:

  I would have to say that I was delighted with The Green Mile. The film is a little "soft" in some ways. I like to joke with Frank that his movie was really the first R-rated Hallmark Hall of Fame production. For a story that is set on death row, it has a really feel-good, praise-the-human condition sentiment to it. I certainly don’t have a problem with that because I am a sentimentalist at heart.
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  (#9) Cujo

  • Dee Wallace, Danny Pintauro, Ed Lauter, Daniel Hugh Kelly, Christopher Stone, Billy Jayne, Mills Watson, Kaiulani Lee

  Cujo, the story of a rabid dog who turns on his human family, is a book Stephen King doesn't even remember writing. He wrote the story at the height of his drug and alcohol addiction. Despite this, he does enjoy the film adaptation. He said:

  Cujo is a terrific picture. You know, that one often gets overlooked. If I have a resentment, it’s that Dee Wallace never got nominated for an Academy Award. She did a terrific job as the woman who gets stuck out there with the rabid dog who’s menacing them.
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  (#11) Children of the Corn

  • Linda Hamilton, Peter Horton, R. G. Armstrong, Courtney Gains, John Philbin, Julie Maddalena, John Franklin, Mitch Carter, Robby Kiger, Eric Freeman, Anne Marie McEvoy, Jonas Marlowe, Corey Frizzell, Teresa Toigo, Dan Snook, Patrick Boylan, Dennis Carl, Suzy Southam, D.G. Johnson, Elmer Soderstrom, David Cowen

  Children of the Corn follows a couple who heads into a small town in Nebraska, where they find the children have taken out all the adults. The movie led to nine sequels that do not have King's stamp of approval.

  Despite the success of the original film, King notes, "I could do without all of the Children of the Corn sequels. I actually like the original pretty well. I thought they did a pretty good job on that.”
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  (#8) Carrie

  • John Travolta, Sissy Spacek, Piper Laurie, Nancy Allen, Amy Irving, Sydney Lassick, Edie McClurg, Betty Buckley, William Katt, Priscilla Pointer, P. J. Soles, Stefan Gierasch, Michael Talbott, Cindy Daly, Harry Gold, Terry Bolo, Doug Cox, Nichelle North, Anson Downes, Rory Stevens, Glen Vance, Michael Towers, Cameron De Palma, Deirdre Berthrong, Katie Irving, Dan Protheroe

  Carrie is the story of a telekinetic teen and her overprotective mother. It was King's first big book and he was paid just $2,500 for the rights. He is pleased with what director Brian De Palma did in the 1976 film adaptation, however, saying: 

  De Palma's approach to the material was lighter and more deft than my own - and a good deal more artistic. The book seems clear enough and truthful enough in terms of the characters and their actions, but it lacks the style of De Palma's film. The book attempts to look at the ant farm of high school society dead on; De Palma's examination of this "High School Confidential" world is more oblique and more cutting... Carrie is a good movie. It hasn't aged as well as some of the other ones, but it's still pretty good.

  He was, not, however, interested in the 2013 remake. King wondered, “Why, when the original was so good? I mean, it's not Casablanca or anything, but a really good horror-suspense film, [that's] much better than the book.”
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  (#14) Maximum Overdrive

  • Carrie Fisher, Stephen King, Emilio Estevez, Giancarlo Esposito, Nancy Allen, Frankie Faison, Pat Hingle, Yeardley Smith, Hal Fishman, Leon Rippy, William Hope, J. C. Quinn, Christopher Murney, Christopher Britton, Lou Perryman, Anthony Denison, Holter Graham, Laura Harrington, Oliver Robins, Ellen McElduff, John Short

  A loose adaptation of the short story "Trucks," Maximum Overdrive is the only film King directed himself. The movie is about a group of people who are hunted by a pack of trucks that come to life and try to kill them. King is more critical of this movie, calling it:

  A moron movie, like Splash! You check your brains at the box office and you come out 96 minutes later and pick them up again. People say, "How’d you like the movie," and you can’t say much. It’s not like The Big Chill or 2001... I was coked out of my mind all through its production, and I didn’t know what I was doing.
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  (#1) Doctor Sleep

  • Ewan McGregor, Rebecca Ferguson, Kyliegh Curran, Bruce Greenwood, Zahn McClarnon, Emily Alyn Lind, Carl Lumbly, Alex Essoe, Jocelin Donahue, Jacob Tremblay

  Director Mike Flanagan adapted Doctor Sleep, Stephen King's sequel to The Shining, in 2019 with full permission from the notoriously opinionated author. Flanagan's story combines the images from Stanley Kubrick's 1980 film with King's original story in a way that both pleased the author and satisfied fans of The Shining. In fact, when Flanagan asked King for permission to direct the film, King was won over by the director's acclaimed track record with successful adaptations, including both The Haunting of Hill House and Gerald's Game, which King and Flanagan worked on together. 

  After he read the script for Doctor Sleep "very carefully," King told Entertainment Weekly, he thought, "Everything that I ever disliked about the Kubrick version of The Shining is redeemed for me here." 

  King and Flanagan watched the film together, and afterward, Flanagan said King told him, "You did a beautiful job," and Doctor Sleep "actually warms my feelings up towards the Kubrick film." King corroborated: 

  [Flanagan] created a terrific story, people who have seen this movie flip for it, and I flipped for it, too. Because he managed to take my novel of Doctor Sleep, the sequel, and somehow weld it seamlessly to the Kubrick version of The Shining, the movie. So, yeah, I liked it a lot.

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