Mike Flanagan is best known as a master of horror and his next film “The Life of Chuck” is based on a Stephen King story but it’s far from his usual work…
When you hear that Mike Flanagan is adapting a Stephen King story into a feature film, your horror senses might start tingling but there’s far more hope than anything horrific in his latest work.
Best known for terrifying series such as “The Haunting of Hill House” and “Midnight Mass” not to mention working on two previous adaptations of King’s work with “Gerald’s Game” and “Doctor Sleep” — the direct sequel to “The Shining” — Flanagan has a reputation built around scaring the crap out of his audience.
But just as production was about to begin on “Midnight Mass” back in 2020, Flanagan had to rush back to the United States from Canada as the COVID pandemic gripped the world and the filmmaker was forced to return home before lockdowns potentially prevented him from traveling anywhere. That’s around the same time that he received a manuscript for King’s next anthology book titled “If It Bleeds,” which contained the short story “The Life of Chuck.”
At a time where everything felt sort of hopeless, Flanagan was enthralled by King’s story that partially takes place during the apocalypse but that doesn’t actually speak to the larger plot that unravels over several years.
“The first third of ‘The Life of Chuck’ just rattled me,” Flanagan told Vanity Fair. “There’s no way he wrote this before the world ground to this bizarre halt—but he did. And the feeling of anxiety, and uncertainty, and that everything was falling apart came roaring out at me. I wasn’t sure I could finish it. It just felt too close to the anxiety I was feeling.
“By the end of it, I was in tears, and incredibly uplifted, and convinced I’d read maybe the best thing that he’d written in a decade. I just was floored by the thing. So I fired off an email to him right away saying how much I loved the story, how incredible I thought it was, how meaningful, and important, and how it had really tattooed itself on my heart and said, ‘It’s the movie I want to make so that it’ll exist in the world for my kids.’”
Unfortunately, King wasn’t on board with Flanagan’s idea for a film adaptation of his story but not because he didn’t believe the writer and director could pull it off.
Instead, King’s hesitation centered around Flanagan and producing partner Trevor Macy at Intrepid Pictures already acquiring the rights to the massive eight book series “The Dark Tower” with plans to produce a show that would finally capture the full breadth of the story after numerous other filmmakers had tried and failed. Flanagan dreamed about adapting “The Dark Tower” and he was finally getting his chance but that project also briefly doomed any hope that he’d get to make a film based on “The Life of Chuck.”
“[Stephen King] doesn’t like to give the same filmmaker more than one thing, because it typically means one thing is not advancing at all,” Flanagan revealed. “He said, ‘Well, let’s focus on The Tower and I’ll try to keep this one available for you for later.’”
It was only after Flanagan’s overall deal with Netflix came to an end and he signed onto Amazon instead that pre-production plans on “The Dark Tower” slowed down enough that he was able to return to King and pitch him again on the project.
This time around, King was on board.
“It’s so rare that I get to approach any project that just has not an ounce of cynicism to it. I just really believed in this thing,” Flanagan said. “But it was also clear that we would have an incredibly uphill battle bringing the story to any major studio. They would try to make it as familiar as possible, instead of leaning into what makes it so different.
“[Once King gave us permission], I was off like a shot. I think I turned in the draft to him before he got around to sending the formal agreement.”
The finished product is a sprawling epic that traverses three periods of time for the life of lowly accountant Chuck Krantz with Tom Hiddleston taking on the lead role for the center section of the film. Of course a younger and older actor step in to play Chuck during those periods of his life with the film actually playing in reverse with the end of times at the beginning of the movie.
While the film does address the end of the world, Flanagan approached “The Life of Chuck” with far more optimism and hope than you’d expect for this kind of story. Even with disaster looming, Flanagan wanted to represent a totally different outlook than the the typical disaster film.
“A disaster movie has people meeting the end while running from tidal waves, and this story has people sitting quietly holding hands looking at the stars,” Flanagan said.
While Flanagan will eventually return to horror in the future, he was so excited to make “The Life of Chuck” that this truly became a passion project for him.
Despite getting King’s blessing to make the movie, the famed writer behind classics like “Salem’s Lot” and “IT” still had doubts that “The Life of Chuck” was actually adaptable into a feature film.
Once King sat down and watched Flanagan’s version of his story, he immediately changed his mind and now calls the movie “a happiness machine.”
“The Life of Chuck” is set to debut at the Toronto International Film Festival that kicks off on Thursday with hopes to secure a distribution deal for the movie to receive a wider release.
