Mike Flanagan Talks Gerald’s Game Adaptation; Will Be a Netflix Film!
John Squires
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With films like Absentia, Oculus, Hush, Before I Wake, and this year’s Ouija: Origin of Evil already under his belt, Mike Flanagan is fast becoming one of the most prolific filmmakers in the horror game. If all goes according to plan, he’ll soon be adapting Stephen King’s Gerald’s Game, which looks like it’ll be a Netflix film!
In an interview with Rue Morgue, Flanagan spoke about the dream project.
“Stephen King has been my hero since I was a child,” Flanagan noted, “and one of the things about being a fan of his is that I’m used to the familiar heartbreak of seeing his film adaptations and feeling like something’s gone off, and that the source material I love so much has not translated properly—with obvious exceptions. It’s just that for every SHAWSHANK or GREEN MILE or STAND BY ME, you’ve got…the others, that really hurt! It’s very important for me, as a fan, not to end up in that pile. I loved GERALD’S GAME from the minute I put it down; I had gooseflesh all over my arms and my neck when I finished it, and I remember just exhaling and saying, ‘I want to make this into a movie—and it’s unfilmable!’ [laughs] and shaking my head, thinking, ‘If I could crack this, this could be one of the greatest King adaptations of them all.’”
“If you know the source material,” he continued, “you’ll know there are a lot of challenges inherent in that story. Not so much the narrative challenges of how to adapt it; it took me 10 years of constantly thinking about the book to crack the cinematic version. But it’s a real challenge for financiers and distributors, who say, ‘Yeah, we love your work, we love Stephen King, but this story, this particular story? We don’t know how it works,’ without reshaping it to fit a much more conventional structure, which I did not want to do. And Netflix, because of how well HUSH has done, said, ‘We’re really interested in this, and we’d like to do it the way you want to do it.’ And that eliminated the pressure of having to test-screen the movie and define the demographic that’s going to watch it—all of that stuff that typically comes into the conversation when you’re trying to figure out how to market a film for a wide theatrical release. It just cleared the table, so that I can make the movie I want to make.”
“I’m hoping very much that we can get that movie up on its feet soon.”
Flanagan also noted that he hopes King will be hands-on involved in the adaptation.
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