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King Q & A Q & A with Stephen King, executive producer, screenwriter and author of "Stephen King's The Shining" Colorado's venerable Stanley Hotel served as the primary location for "Stephen King's The Shining," the latest ABC project from Stephen King, America's unparalleled master of horror. King tells how a trip to the Stanley inspired him to write the novel "The Shining" 20 years ago: "It was the first time that my wife and I had been off on our own since we had children. We had moved across the country, because I'd written a couple of books with the Maine setting, and I thought, well maybe something will happen here in Colorado. And at first, nothing did. And we went up there, and we went past that sign that said "Roads may be closed after October." And I said, "Whoa, wait a minute. Something's happening here." And we got to the hotel. And by the time we had dinner -- we got there and it was like the last day of their season . . . and then, we went up to the desk and said, "Can we stay?" And they said, "You can stay if you have cash, we've sent our credit card slips back to Denver. And it just so happened that I had just enough to cover that. We were the only guests at the hotel that night, and the wind was high, and it was blowing around, and one of the shutters had come unanchored and it was clapping against the side of the building. The orchestra was still there, and they were playing, but except for our table, all the chairs were up on the tables . . . so we're playing, and the music is echoing down the hall, and I mean, it was like God had put me there to hear that and see those things. And by the time I went to bed that night, I had the whole book in my mind. On a break from filming at the Stanley, King talks further about "The Shining's" transition to a six-hour miniseries for ABC -- Q -- Tell us what "The Shining" is really about for you . . . A -- I don't think the stories that I tell are really about anything, in the sense that there is a deeper meaning or a deeper subtext. It's a story about a family that shows up in an extremely bad place, a place that goes to work on the father, and the son, and that begins to twist them out of shape and bend them back and forth until one of them breaks. The wife is caught in the middle. It was written at a time in my life when I was adjusting to the idea of kids, and I was adjusting to the idea that not all my emotions about my children were the ones that I had come in contact with on "Father Knows Best" and "Ozzie and Harriet" -- all those shows of my childhood which were what I knew of the nuclear family, since I didn't grow up in one myself. So I think "The Shining" is a really good ghost story, but it is a story about a hotel with a history, a malevolent history that has a way of coming back to life. It's also the story about a family that has a history, with a lot of ghosts and a lot of unquiet spirits. The hotel and the marriage mirror each other. What the story is about, to me, is terror and suspense, and hopefully, an audience on the edge of its seats. Q -- You wrote this 20 years ago and are now revisiting the same material decades later. What was that like? A -- I wrote the novel when I was 26, 27 years old, a young man with young children. When I had the opportunity to adapt the novel for a six-hour miniseries, I was almost twice that age. Instead of being 26, I was 47. Instead of having two children, 4 and 2 years old, I had three children, one 25, one 23, and one 19. My child rearing was pretty much done, so I had a chance to look back and re-examine some of the themes and ideas that I felt more intuitively than actually intellectually the first time. It was a great experience. It was like having closure on an issue. Q-- What do you think the audience will experience as they watch this? A -- It's the story about a family that's trying to save itself. It's the story about a family that is desperately trying to reinvent itself, and leave a miserable past behind, and discover a future where they can all live together, because there's a lot of love. Their step away from the past is to come to this old hotel, which is empty in the winter time, and to take a season off to try and rest and recuperate and get ready for the rest of their lives. The tragedy of this story, and the place where the suspense arises, is that the Overlook is the wrong place for anybody to be in the off season, because it's full of ghosts and full of old violent emotions. And Danny has a psychic force which enables him against his will to bring those ghosts and those old violent forces gradually to life, and they start to channel through Jack. So what the audience should be experiencing, if this works, is a kind of escalating feeling of tension. I hope, frankly, that after night three people don't sleep. I hope we're going to do the scariest thing that's ever been on American television. That's the person that I am, and that's what I do. We're really coming to get you! Q-- Tell us about your cameo appearance in this miniseries . . . A -- I've done appearances in a lot of the movies that have been done. It's not my idea! So Mick [director Mick Garris] asked me if I would appear in the movie. As executive producer and writer, I could have, within limits, picked anybody. I thought, who's the coolest person in this movie who doesn't have any lines, and when I had determined who that character was, I decided to play it. I'm not going to say who the character is . . . if they want to know, they can damn well tune in and find me! |
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