Stephen King on 'The Life of Chuck,' the end of the world and, yes, joy

NEW YORK — Stephen King 's first editor, Bill Thompson, once said, ''Steve has a movie camera in his head.''

So vividly drawn is King's fiction that it's offered the basis for some 50 feature films. For half a century, since Brian De Palma's 1976 film ''Carrie,'' Hollywood has turned, and turned again, to King's books for their richness of character, nightmare and sheer entertainment.

Open any of those books up at random, and there's a decent chance you'll encounter a movie reference, too. Rita Hayworth. ''The Wizard of Oz.'' ''Singin' in the Rain.'' Sometimes even movies based on King's books turn up in his novels. That King's books have been such fodder for the movies is owed, in part, to how much of a moviegoer their author is.

''I love anything from ‘The 400 Blows' to something with that guy Jason Statham,'' King says, speaking by phone from his home in Maine. ''The worst movie I ever saw was still a great way to spend an afternoon. The only movie I ever walked out on was ‘Transformers.' At a certain point I said, ‘This is just ridiculous.'''

Over time, King has developed a personal policy in how he talks about the adaptations of his books. ''My idea is: If you can't say something nice, keep your mouth shut,'' he says.

The most notable exception was Stanley Kubrick's ''The Shining,'' which King famously called ''a big beautiful Cadillac with no engine inside.'' But every now and then, King is such a fan of an adaptation that he's excited to talk about it. That's very much the case with ''The Life of Chuck,'' Mike Flanagan's new adaptation of King's novella of the same name published in the 2020 collection ''If It Bleeds.''

In ''The Life of Chuck,'' which Neon releases in theaters Friday (nationwide June 13), there are separate storylines but the tone-setting opening is apocalyptic. The internet, like a dazed prize fighter, wobbles on its last legs before going down. California is said to be peeling away from the mainland ''like old wallpaper.''

And yet in this doomsday tale, King is at his most sincere. ''The Life of Chuck,'' the book and the movie, is about what matters in life when everything else is lost. There is dancing, Walt Whitman and joy.

''In ‘The Life of Chuck,' we understand that this guy's life is cut short, but that doesn't mean he doesn't experience joy,'' says King. ''Existential dread and grief and things are part of the human experience, but so is joy.''

Stephen King, the humanist

It's telling that when King, our preeminent purveyor of horror, writes about doom times, he ends up scaling it down to a single life. While darkness and doom have, and probably always will, mark his work, King — a more playful, instinctual, genre-skipping writer than he's often credited as — ''The Life of Chuck'' is a prime example of King, the humanist.

''An awful lot of people assume, because he writes so much stuff that's so scary, they kind of forget the reason his horror works so well is he's always juxtaposing it with light and with love and with empathy,'' says Flanagan, who has twice before adapted King (''Doctor Sleep,'' ''Gerald's Game'') and is in the midst of making a ''Carrie'' series for Amazon.

''You forget that ‘It' isn't about the clown, it's about the kids and their friendship," adds Flanagan. ''‘The Stand' isn't about the virus or the demon taking over the world, it's ordinary people who have to come together and stand against a force they cannot defeat.''

King, 77, has now written somewhere around 80 books, including the just released ''Never Flinch.'' The mystery thriller brings back King's recent favorite protagonist, the private investigator Holly Gibney, who made her stand-alone debut in ''If It Bleeds.'' It's Gibney's insecurities, and her willingness to push against them, that has kept King returning to her.

''It gave me great pleasure to see Holly grow into a more confident person,'' King says. ''She never outgrows all of her insecurities, though. None of us do.''

''Never Flinch'' is a reminder that King has always been less of a genre-first writer than a character-first one. He tends to fall in love with a character and follow them through thick and thin.

''I'm always happy writing. That's why I do it so much,'' King says, chuckling. ''I'm a very chipper guy because I get rid of all that dark stuff in the books.''

Contemporary anxieties

Dark stuff, as King says, hasn't been hard to come by lately. The kind of climate change disaster found in ''The Life of Chuck,'' King says, often dominates his anxieties.

''We're creeping up little by little on being the one country who does not acknowledge it's a real problem with carbon in the atmosphere,'' King says. ''That's crazy. Certain right wing politicians can talk all they want about how we're saving the world for our grandchildren. They don't care about that. They care about money.''

On social media, King has been a sometimes critic of President Donald Trump, whose second term has included battles with the arts, academia and public financing for PBS and NPR. Over the next four years, King predicts, ''Culture is going to go underground.''

In ''Never Flinch,'' Holly Gibney is hired as a bodyguard by a women's rights activist whose lecture tour is being plagued by mysterious acts of violence. In the afterward of the book, King includes a tribute to ''supporters of women's right to choose who have been murdered for doing their duty.'' ''I'm sure they're not going to like that,'' King says of right-wing critics.

The original germ for ''The Life of Chuck'' had nothing to do with current events. One day in Boston, King noticed a drummer busking on Boylston Street. He had the vision of a businessman in a suit who, walking by, can't resist dancing with abandon to the drummer's beat.

King, a self-acknowledged dancer (though only in private, he notes), latched onto a story that would turn on the unpredictable nature of people, tracing the inner life of that imagined passerby. In the film, he's played by Tom Hiddleston. Chuck first appears, oddly, on a billboard that haunts and confuses a local teacher (Chiwetel Ejiofor) who's struggling to get his students to care about literature or education with the possible end of the world encroaching.

Sincerity for a cynical world

It's a funny but maybe not coincidental irony that many of the best King adaptations, like ''Stand By Me'' and ''The Shawshank Redemption," have come from the author's more warm-hearted tales. ''The Life of Chuck,'' which won the People's Choice Award last fall at the Toronto International Film Festival, is after a similar spirit.

When King reached out about attending the TIFF world premiere, Flanagan was shocked. The last time King had done that for one of his own adaptations was 26 years ago, for ''The Green Mile.'' That movie, like ''The Shawshank Redemption,'' was a box-office disappointments, King recalls, a fate he's hoping ''The Life of Chuck'' can avoid.

''He views this movie as something that's a bit precious,'' says Flanagan. ''He's said a few things to me in the past about how earnest it is, how this is a story without an ounce of cynicism. As it was being released into a cynical world, I think he felt protective of it. I think this one really means something to him.''

The Stephen King industrial complex, meanwhile, keeps rolling along. Coming just this year are series of ''Welcome to Derry'' and ''The Institute'' and a film of ''The Long Walk.'' King, himself, just finished a draft of ''Talisman 3.''

If ''The Life of Chuck'' has particular meaning to King, it could be because it represents something intrinsic about his own life. Chuck's small, seemingly unremarkable existence has grace and meaning because, as Whitman is quoted, he "contains multitudes'' that surprise and delight him. King's fiction is evidence — heaps of it — that he does, too.

''There are some days where I sit down and I think, ‘This is going to be a really good day,' and it's not, at all,'' says King. ''Then other days I sit down and think to myself, ‘I'm really tired and don't feel like doing this,' and then it catches fire. You never know what you're going to get.''