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| A moment from Under The Dome |
He has been dubbed as Walt Disney’s evil twin, prolific as he is with his output of horror, sci-fi and suspense. Stephen King, 65, responds to an email from t2 on the success of the miniseries Under The Dome. Based on his novel, it premiered to an audience of 13.14 million viewers in the US and is now the most-watched summer drama on any American network since 1992. Under The Dome, produced by Steven Spielberg’s Amblin Entertainment, also airs in India, on Big CBS Love, at 10pm on Friday.
Under The Dome is a runaway summer hit in the US. What would you attribute this success to?
I knew Under The Dome was going to be riveting TV. The situation draws you in, and the characters make you keep coming back. We tried to make a show where people become really involved with the fates of the characters, really asking themselves what’s gonna happen next.
For viewers coming into the miniseries midway, what is the basic premise of Under The Dome?
Let’s take an American community, a nice American community, and pop this big bowl over the whole thing so nobody can get out and nobody can get in, and let us see what happens.
As executive producer of the show, how much creative control did you have during the making? Did they seek your approval for the changes from the book?
Well, I’m a go-along guy. When I was a kid my mother used to say, ‘Stephen, if you had been a girl you’d always be pregnant’. And there’s some truth to that. It’s easy for me to let go and let teams of people take over one of my ideas and run with it. Because if you try to hold on and try to run, first of all things don’t happen as easily, and second of all you get ulcers.
What about the politics of the novel? How much of Dick Cheney has gone into “Big Jim” Rennie?
The one character that I did have a clear image of in my mind was Big Jim Rennie because he was based on Dick Cheney (US vice-president under George W. Bush). And when they cast Dean Norris as Big Jim, I thought this is great. There is actually a casual resemblance between the two. So, that was great. In the book, Big Jim is a one-dimensional guy. He is the bad guy, he is the bad politician, short-sighted, authoritarian and Dean has really given it — along with the help of the screenwriters and the directors, he’s given it more texture so that he actually has a softer side, which most people have. I’m totally down with that.
Which films/ TV series based on your books would you rate as the most satisfactory?
Shawshank Redemption, Misery, Stand by Me and The Mist. One that doesn’t get a lot of play is Cujo with Dee Wallace, and that’s a fantastic movie. We also did a miniseries for ABC called Storm of the Century. It was good and I’m comfortable with what they’re doing with Under The Dome because basically what we have here is a miniseries that has a door at the end of it that says if people like this we can go on, so it works either way.
Why do you revisit your earlier stories or manuscripts? You did so for Under The Dome as well.
It sure isn’t planned. I don’t even plan what I’m going to have for dinner. The ideas come up and you write them down but like with Under The Dome, when I had the idea to start with it in the ’70s, it was a time around when gas prices started to shoot up and OPEC (Organisation of the Petroleum Exporting Countries) decided: ‘Well, we are really the tail that wags the dog here because everybody in the world has cars and we’re crazy to be charging $11 a barrel for oil when resources are limited’. So, I was very aware of that and it was around the time of Chernobyl and concerns about pollution and global warming. For the first time, people started to say ‘What are we doing to our planet?’ And I thought lets put all these people under a glass dome and see what happens to them. But I just didn’t have the resources at that time. I was teaching school and I had no money and no time. Really, I snatched time to write on the weekends but I couldn’t do the research. When I finally got back I thought to myself, I want to try this again, the first thing I did was hire a guy named Russ Dorr, who’s a physician’s assistant, and he knew a lot about medicine and I said, ‘If I give you some money, will you research these other things about climate and all that other stuff?’ Basically that was the situation.
Horror is held in low esteem by critics. Do you worry about the literary value of your work?
I don’t know. I was drawn to stories of the supernatural, stories of suspense and horror from the time that I was a child, really. And I think that it’s something that comes built-in with the equipment, the same way that I think there are novelists like Nora Roberts, for instance, who are drawn to tell those stories of love and romance and that’s fine. And there are people like Agatha Christie. I read her books and I’m in awe that somebody constructed those plots where they all make sense and at the end of it you say ‘Well, yes it was, it was right in front of me the whole time’. Those are like magic tricks to me. I’ve never been an intellectual writer. The relationship I want to have with readers is more visceral than that. I hope there’s something to think about in the books that I write but I wouldn’t like it if you read them twice and thought about stuff the second time.
