“Diabolically difficult”: When Stephen King’s favourite director turned him down
While his books have never been regarded as especially highbrow work in a literary sense, and many of the feature-length adaptations of his bibliography are essentially B-tier genre films, several heavyweight directors have taken a crack at a Stephen King movie at one time or another.
One of the most innovative auteurs of their generation got the ball rolling when Brian De Palma’s Carrie inadvertently launched one of cinema’s most prolific subgenres, with Stanley Kubrick, David Cronenberg, John Carpenter, George A Romero, Rob Reiner, and Edgar Wright all joining the club over the decades.
Only a select few have brought more than one of King’s tales to the screen, with Mike Flanagan becoming the 21st century’s version of Mick Garris by adapting multiple novels, novellas, and short stories for film, television, and streaming, but in terms of consistency, nobody can lay a glove on Frank Darabont.
He’s helmed three of the horror legend’s page-to-screen translations, and they’re all remarkable in their own way. The Shawshank Redemption is one of the most beloved movies of all time, The Green Mile remains as capable now as it did almost 30 years ago of reducing viewers to tears, and The Mist delivers a gut-punch of an ending that King endorsed as being superior to the one he’d written for the page.
“I love to work with Frank,” King said. “Frank still has a child’s imagination, coupled with an adult’s ability to see the core of the material and then execute his vision. Frank has always done good work. I feel very comfortable that I’m going to get something from Frank that’s going to be usually extraordinary.” That says it all about how highly the author regards the filmmaker as a talent, and three impressive and acclaimed movies only reinforced that belief.
As far as King was concerned, Darabont could do no wrong with the material he’d created, so it made sense that he’d approach him to adapt one of the trickiest. After spending years slowly crawling through development on its way to the big screen, King stumbled upon the notion that, if anyone was capable of taming the epic, expansive, and unwieldy The Dark Tower into a manageable blockbuster, there was only one man for the job. Unfortunately, Darabont wasn’t interested.
“I actually turned Steve down,” he told IndieWire. “He called me once, and it’s not the only time he ever called me, but he called me once and asked me if I was interested in taking on The Dark Tower. I was very flattered and very honoured that he asked me. But, man, so much of that story is so internalised.”
Darabont chewed it over for a moment or two, but it didn’t take him long to make a decision. “I thought, ‘Oh my god, this could be the next ten years of my life and miss the mark, because it is a diabolically difficult thing to adapt,'” he continued, noting that he was also “exhausted anyway” and in the midst of a 12-year behind-the-camera sabbatical that stretched from Mob City to Stranger Things.
With the benefit of hindsight, Darabont should have breathed a massive sigh of relief. The Dark Tower was an awful fantasy flick, one that was deservedly panned by critics and tanked at the box office, with Flanagan aiming to show that some turds can be polished when he reboots it as a streaming series.
