Mike Flanagan knows horror. Any fan of the genre will tell you that he’s one of the most exciting directors working today, creating haunting and uniquely terrifying films like “Oculus,” “Gerald’s Game,” and “Doctor Sleep,” not to mention his many Netflix series, including “The Haunting of Hill House” and “The Fall of the House of Usher.” His latest film, “The Life of Chuck,” may therefore seem like a bit of a departure. It doesn’t explicitly aim to scare viewers in the ways that they might expect from a Flanagan production. But as the filmmaker himself would explain, it’s a logical continuation of the kinds of stories he likes to explore. Namely, it concerns itself with big thematic topics, like the impact of one person on others and the peculiarities of living a finite existence. It’s a moving, expansive film that has the capacity to horrify, stun, and affect its audience just as much as anything he’s made before, even if it has no broken-neck ghosts or bathtub-dwelling ghouls.
In this interview with Next Best Picture, Mike Flanagan delves into the details of how the Stephen King story that inspired the film came to him at exactly the right time. He also talks about the differences and similarities of telling stories on TV and film, what it’s like to adapt King’s work, and how he came to work with his son for the very first time.
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This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
This is Cody Dericks with Next Best Picture, and I am beyond thrilled to be talking with one of my favorite working filmmakers, the writer and director of “The Life of Chuck,” Mike Flanagan. Mike, how are you doing today?
I’m so good, Cody. How are you?
Doing well. Glad to be talking with you.
Oh, likewise. Thank you for your time.
Of course. So this is obviously far from your first Stephen King adaptation. You’ve made “Gerald’s Game,” you’ve made “Doctor Sleep,” which I just have to tell you, while I have you, I consider one of the greatest films of its decade. What is it about this Stephen King short story that spoke to you?
I first read this in April 2020, so it was only, I think, three weeks into the lockdown, and it was unlike anything I’d ever read before, certainly from Stephen King, but maybe ever. I had a hard time with it, actually, in the first few pages. It hit kind of too close to home. This story about what seemed to be the end of the world really kind of hit me in a raw place because we all were feeling that anyway, looking out the window. It felt like it was gonna be just despair and anxiety, and I kind of didn’t want to keep reading it at the beginning. And so I was shocked, as the story progressed and I realized what he was actually doing. You know, by the middle of the story, there’s this kind of explosively joyful dance sequence. And then by the end, I was like, this isn’t the end of the world. It’s this beautifully kind of earnest look at a life and what it means to be alive. And I put the book down feeling so much hope and joy and peace, and I was so grateful for that at that time. It was unlike anything I’d ever seen from Stephen.
And it was a story without a cynical bone in its body. I mean, how often do we come across something like that? I found it completely irresistible. I desperately wanted the movie to exist in the world for my kids, for when they felt hopeless. And I wanted it to exist kind of unmolested by what typically happens to stories this earnest, you know, as they go through a studio system and as they go through the machinations of Hollywood. I just really thought it was this pure, very rare little slice of heart, and I just wanted it to kind of make it out into the world as it was. It was completely irresistible to me.
Speaking to that earnest energy, a lot of your work has strains of hope or deep connection to humanity, even if they are partially intended to scare the audience. This is your first movie or property in a little bit that isn’t, again, focused on scaring as one of its tactics for appealing to the audience or getting the audience’s attention. So, talk to me about your decision to work on and what it was like making an explicitly non-horror film.
Sure. You know, it’s funny because I think Stephen King has had a similar trajectory where he’s known so much for horror that people are always kind of repeatedly surprised when they realize he’s also written “The Body,” which became “Stand By Me,” or “The Shawshank Redemption.” I think Stephen King, at his heart, is a humanist and an optimist, but he’s found success kind of wrapping those stories in the genre. I came into filmmaking the same way. I came in through independent horror films. It was one of the genres where you could actually make a movie with no money and no star power and have it find a wide audience. So, horror has always made sense like that. I’ve always loved horror because I think the genre is underestimated. I think it’s misunderstood. I think when it’s done a certain way, it’s a beautiful thing. It’s a cathartic thing. So, I’ve never really considered the work that I do to be explicitly horror. I mean, I know that it is. I get it, though. But everything I’ve ever gotten to work on, to me, has been about something else, has been right about grief or trauma, has been about death and life. So, there’s always a bigger story to tell, or else I’m not really drawn to it. But this, to me, felt more than anything like getting to kind of shed all of the wrappings that I usually put my stuff in, and so it didn’t feel like a departure for me.
I understand very well that it feels like a departure for people who know my work. But to my wife and to a lot of the actors who I work with, who know me the best, they would say this actually is the closest to me as any of the other projects have been, and I suspect the same is true of Stephen King. My read of him over the years, having gotten to know him, is that this isn’t a departure for Steve. This is like the most Steve thing that you’re gonna find. So, it felt terrific to just be telling this story on its own terms, and I hope I get to kind of go back to that. I’ll always love horror. It’s home for me. It’s where I naturally go anyway.
Well, it still feels very decidedly like your interests, even if there’s no, you know, premonitions of your own death or priests that turn into vampires. That’s not in this film specifically, but you definitely still deal with the realities of existence being finite, and you seem to love asking big questions about the meaning of life and investigating what it is to be a human with a destined expiration date. That’s always been present in almost everything that you’ve made. So what is it about such existential, big question material that appeals to you?
Oh, I mean, I just can’t stop asking those questions in life. I think questions like that about why we’re here, what here even is, what could be beyond it, and what the purpose of it all is; what we can hope to try to achieve, what we fear about the unknown of what happens after. I think that’s at the root of the oldest and biggest stories that human beings have ever told. I think these are unanswerable questions, and so inevitably we create stories to try to contain them, and that’s how you get myth and religion. And for me, I’ve never been able to wander too far from those. Movies and television are primarily entertainment. They’re meant to kind of divert us from the bigger questions of life. I, for better or worse, have always really wanted to use stories to try to understand these things myself and to ruminate on them. And sometimes it’s barely hidden, like “Midnight Mass” is really just a direct kind of pipeline into an internal dialogue that was really consuming my life at the time I was working on it. And other times, you’re trying really hard to make an escape and to make an entertainment, and you kind of smuggle the big questions into it.
But yeah, I’ve always been very drawn to the existential questions, and with that comes horror. You know, when you stare into the abyss, that’s the scariest thing for me. And in a way, “The Life of Chuck” has some incredibly horrific elements in it. You know, when you think about the end of existence and the end of a life and whether we’d want to know how we’re going to die, what we would do with a room that has that information that is locked away from us, there’s horror in that, but it’s human horror. It’s very existential horror. And so that stuff really speaks to me. But for better or worse –– and with apologies to people who might just be looking to come to a scary movie for some scares –– I’ve never been able to resist kind of trying to ask big questions.
Right. And I said no premonitions of death, but I guess it’s not quite Bent-Neck Lady what Chuck goes through, but there’s similar energy there. This is your first movie since “Doctor Sleep” in 2019, so it’s been a little bit since you’ve been in theaters. In that time, though, you’ve created multiple TV miniseries for Netflix. Did your time working on television teach you anything new about filmmaking?
Oh my God, of course. Everything I ever get to work on teaches me volumes new about filmmaking by the end of it. I had this wonderful run, though, where for about half a decade, it was all long-form storytelling for television. It’s a whole different way to approach a story. It’s much more elaborate. It’s much more difficult, in its way, to structure a story that way and spread it out over, you know, seven or eight or 10 episodes. But, you know, the language is the same. It’s still trying to be visceral, visual, emotional storytelling. The containers are very different and your goals are very different insofar as how you wanna hold and capture and maintain someone’s attention. But I’ve always learned so much from every project I work on. I think working that long in television really helped me develop what I hope are effective ways to deal with depth of character, to learn how to say more with less words, which is always…it’s the battle I’ll be fighting my whole life. But yeah, I have learned a ton.
It was a relief, though, to come back to a story that was so contained. And to be thinking again about how this is gonna look on a big screen as opposed to, how do we keep someone’s attention away from their own living room or their own phone, which is a whole different level of challenge when you get into television. But to maximize an intimate story’s visual impact on a large canvas, it was really fun to play with that again.
When you read the short story, did you have an idea of possibly making it for TV, because it’s so episodic? It’s built in right there; you can just expand it, and there’s a miniseries right there.
It certainly crossed my mind. That is always the first question: what size canvas is for this? Ultimately, for this one, it felt really well-suited to a feature film. And three clean acts; to expand it into a series would require a certain amount of invention and expansion, which sometimes I’m thrilled to do. I just wrapped my series of “Carrie” for Amazon. I just wrapped on Friday, and that requires an enormous amount of invention and expansion because the novel fits perfectly into about a 90-minute film, and we’re doing eight episodes. With [“The Haunting of Hill House”] as well, it was like, yes, this is an opportunity to expand this universe and to play within it. But with “The Life of Chuck,” it just ultimately, to me, felt very clearly that the story wanted to be told in a contained way.
You love to work with the same actors multiple times, and “Life of Chuck” is almost like an All-Star lineup of Team Mike Flanagan. So, what is it about utilizing a familiar ensemble of players that appeals to you?
It’s one of the best things about what I get to do for a living. Honestly, it started off, I think, out of ease. When you develop a shorthand and trust with an actor, building that again from scratch takes time. And knowing that you have someone you can rely on and collaborate with without having to reestablish that language is just more efficient. But it has also become something much more over the years. Because now when I go to work, in a lot of cases I’m going to work with my friends and my family. And some of these actors, we’re on our eighth, ninth, 10th job together. It’s a reunion every time, and it’s exciting because I get to see them stretch and grow and do things that they might not have known they could do. And I certainly didn’t know they could do. And it’s been really fun to throw challenging parts at actors and see what happens. It’s become my favorite thing about my job. You live in these worlds and these bubbles you make in production, and they burst pretty violently when you wrap. It’s just over, and then you’re kind of back waiting for the next one.
But whenever I go back to work, I have people in front of the camera with actors and behind the camera with crew…I’ve got a lot of the same crew I’ve had my whole career now. They are family. We’ve grown together, and when we are reunited, it’s like no time has passed. But we also get to mark that time, and it makes for some profound moments. When we did “Life of Chuck,” we filmed it in the same location where I filmed my very first real movie, “Oculus,” many years before, and it was most of the same crew, and it was Karen Gillan (that was her first movie as well). So, we were walking on the same streets and eating in the same restaurants that we did at the very beginning of our feature film careers, only we were there 12, 13 years later, and looking back at it. And then we’re there with Annalise Basso, who played a young Karen Gillan in “Oculus,” and Karen and I kind of simultaneously realized that Annalise today is older than Karen was when we filmed “Oculus.”
Oh my God.
Yeah. And that just kind of blew our minds, you know? It’s a beautiful thing to have that continuity and to have that trust and to just know that, yeah, you’re getting to do exciting work with people you love. I’m incredibly fortunate that my career has shaped up that way. But we just wrapped “Carrie” and the tears as we said goodbye to some of these actors. We have some new actors here who are new to the company, who are gonna be forever part of it, but saying goodbye to Samantha Sloyan when we wrapped…Rahul Kohli…these are my family. And so it’s really a special thing.
Before I let you go, speaking of family, you’ve worked with your wife, Kate Siegel, many times, but on this film, you also had another family member on the cast list: your son Cody. Nice name, by the way. He plays the youngest version of Chuck. And I asked Kate the same question when I interviewed her a few months ago, but what was it like working with him?
Oh, it was wonderful. We –– and I’m sure Kate mentioned this –– we were initially reluctant about it because we don’t wanna put our kids into this business. This business can be really rough on kids. It really can destroy them. And we’ve been very careful to keep a separation between show business and our family. We tend to travel as a family if I’m working or Kate’s working. We don’t like to separate everybody. And so we were all there together anyway. Cody, six years old at the time, was really excited to do it. He kept asking if he could be part of it, and he happened to look so much like Benjamin [Pajak] and then Jacob [Tremblay]. It just fit. It was appropriate casting, just based on the requirements of the part first, which is always the most important, but it was such a special time to have him on set. He has his mother’s fearlessness on set. He was not intimidated by the camera or the other actors. And his first scene he ever did was with Mark Hamill.
Not bad!
Yeah! As he gets older, I have to impress on him how not normal that is. And he did his scene, and then he turned to Mark as we called “cut,” and he went, “Great job.” Mark went, “Thank you!” And they hit it off right away. And then Cody came up to me and he said, “I think my character would say something here.” And I was like, good grief, man. You’re six and you’re also your mother’s son. But it was such a special thing, and I get choked up seeing him in it because he’s already, you know, he’s about to turn nine, that version of him is gone. They grow up so quickly. And that’s the double-edged sword of this is we get to capture this little moment in Cody’s life. It was a wonderful and special thing to work with him on this. We try to be very judicious about it and very careful about not rolling our kids nepotistically into our work. But this was a special case, and it was a really magical thing for our family.
Well, this is a really special film, so I can’t think of a better first collaboration. I’ve been spreading the word about this movie since it came out. I think it’s a really impactful piece of art. I’m always gonna see everything that has your name attached to it, that’s not a challenge for me, but I’m really excited for more people to continue discovering “The Life of Chuck.”
Thank you so much, so thrilled that you enjoyed it.
Of course. Thanks, Mike.
Thanks, Cody.
“The Life of Chuck” is now available to rent or purchase on VOD and is also available on Blu-Ray or 4K UHD from NEON.
You can follow Cody and hear more of his thoughts on the Oscars and Film on Twitter @codymonster91
