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**LilMouse** · 09-21-2019, 10:19 AM

This part of the article made me go hmmmmm

Quote:

Lesson No. 4: But don’t be too loyal

MUSCHIETTI The whole idea of adapting a story into a film is about translating it into a different language, and that language has its own exclamation points and question marks. When you adapt a book into a movie, the book is not always tense in the way you need it to be. So you need to come up with new things, and you have to discard things that are not useful for cinematic escalation. The scene in “Chapter Two” where Pennywise bashes his head against the fun house wall, for example, was not in the book, but there wasn’t a scene that gave you that kind of anxiety at that point in the story.

The structure of the book is fascinating. But you think you’re catching a rhythm, and then it’s interrupted by Mike Hanlon’s interludes. Or it goes back to 1958, and you get this really experiential section that goes into each character and their minds. If you adapted the book with that same structure, it wouldn’t be a very interesting cinematic experience.

FLANAGAN My whole pitch for the movie hinged on the Overlook Hotel, which burns down at the end of the novel but is still standing at the end of the film. In [“Doctor Sleep”], King makes it so clear out of the gate that he’s ignoring the Kubrick film. And while I’m such a Stephen King fan, as someone who had experienced the Kubrick film at a young age and had been influenced by it in a really profound way, it was really difficult to reconcile this schizophrenic experience. All of the visual language I associate with the characters and with the Overlook Hotel was Kubrick’s language, but all of the characterizations and story lines were King’s.

“The Shining” might not be a very good adaptation of the book, but you can’t argue that it isn’t a masterpiece of cinema and that it’s defined how an entire generation views horror. My argument to King was that if we’re going to be revisiting the world of Dan Torrance and of the Overlook, we’re kind of obliged to do so in the language that the world knows. And like it or not, that language was Kubrick’s.

His initial reaction was no, he did not want to go back into the world of Kubrick. But the more I was able to explain to him how I was going to do it he said, “O.K., under those circumstances, go for it.” Had he not endorsed that, I wouldn’t have done the movie. There was no upside for me to be part of yet another adaptation set within the world of the Overlook Hotel that was going to upset Steve.