The one director Stephen King trusts the most: “I’d be a fool not to”
As one of the most heavily-adapted authors in history, the page-to-screen pipeline of Stephen King stories has been trundling along for almost 50 years, which has inevitably led to movies that cover the good, the bad, and the ugly of the cinematic spectrum.
Several of the horror icon’s terrifying tales have been transformed into big screen classics; plenty of them have hit big at the box office, and a lot of them have been entertaining, at the very least. On the other side of the coin, there have been countless forgettable flicks and more than a few outright catastrophes.
King hasn’t escaped unscathed, either, with his one and only feature comfortably sitting among the bottom tier of adaptations. Maximum Overdrive was a disaster on all fronts, and he’d be the first to admit it, which just goes to show that not even the originator is immune from the pitfalls that have blighted many of his works when they make the jump.
Outside of his famous distaste for Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, though, King has never been shy in praising the finest movies inspired by his writings. He even called Brian De Palma’s Carrie better than the book, with Rob Reiner’s Stand by Me and Misery getting the thumbs-up from their creator.
However, it’s hard to look past Frank Darabont when it comes to the single most qualified person to take the reins of a film based on a King book. After all, he steered The Shawshank Redemption to classic status, left viewers emotional wrecks by the time The Green Mile concluded, and dropped an all-timer of an ending when he altered the finale of The Mist.
With that in mind, King heartily endorsed the filmmaker as somebody he’s happy to see tackle his stories, a trust that’s been earned and then some. “Well, I’d be a fool not to trust Frank because every adaptation he’s done has been terrific, and that goes back to the first one,” he told Movies. “The fact is everything that Frank does has his own personal style; his own personal feeling, and I love it.”
There’s a difference between trusting a friend and trusting a filmmaker, but fortunately, Darabont has that well-covered on both fronts. “I trust him as a person, but more important than that, I trust his creative sensibility,” King offered, with The Shawshank Redemption, The Green Mile, and The Mist encapsulating the director’s ability to “see ordinary people in the movies portrayed truthfully.”
Darabont is three-for-three on King adaptations so far, and while he hasn’t taken the reins on another one – or made a feature of any kind – since The Mist hit cinemas in 2007, he’s going to take some dislodging as the finest filmic purveyor of the author’s back catalogue.
