Mick Garris is not what you’d expect a horror writer-director to be. Calm, genial and charming, he speaks highly of his cast, his crew, and the deranged master of terror who has given him the material for five of his movies. In a recent interview with FilmStew, the director talked about his new film Riding the Bullet, his regrets over never having seen the Beatles, and his good friend who just happens to write stories about people being brutally slaughtered.
“I wish I’d made Misery,” Garris confesses when quizzed about his favorite Stephen King movies. “I wish I’d made Dead Zone, probably a lot of people are glad that I didn’t, but those are such good movies. The Green Mile, I wish I had made. There are several really good ones, and there are a bunch I’m really glad I didn’t make. Stand By Me may be my favorite of them all; it’s one of the great films of all time, as Shawshank is.”
Garris met King in the early nineties, after he had been selected to helm the movie adaptation of Sleepwalkers. Since then, their friendship has grown over the course of The Stand, the remake of The Shining, Quicksilver Highway and now, Bullet and the upcoming 2005 TV miniseries Desperation. Garris says he sees all the King movies, and although he is proud of his own work, it’s been hard to look at some of the great ones and not wish he had gotten a go at those scripts instead.
But then again, there are lots of lesser King movies as well that Garris was lucky enough to sidestep. “Well, the funny thing is that when you see one that wasn’t done well,” he laughs, “it isn’t ‘Oh, I wish I had done that,’ but ‘Boy, I’m glad my name’s not on that one’ or something like that.”
This time around, Garris has taken over King’s short story about a boy named Alan who is coming to grips with his own fear of riding a roller coaster called The Bullet. The script that he wrote and directed is more of a psychological thriller than a graphic one, and Garris says that came in handy with the film’s relatively small budget.
“The adaptation wasn’t difficult, as far as the writing goes,” he remembers. “Making the film itself - it’s a road movie, and we did it in Vancouver. The weather is anything but easy in Vancouver, but the crews are used to dealing with it. We had a very tight production schedule and budget, and those are the biggest challenges of it – trying to turn something internal into something external.”
Garris had to come up with more of a back story for King’s teenaged protagonist, and so he moved the setting to a time when he would have been about the same age as the character: 1969. “The book isn’t set in the Sixties. That was something I must take credit or blame for,” he laughs.
In the film, Alan (Jonathan Jackson) makes the ultimate sacrifice to go see his sickly mother in the hospital – he gives his John Lennon concert tickets away. That moment spoke to Garris, a huge fan of the Fab Four who still regrets never having seen Lennon in concert. “The symbol of the Beatles was something that came very much from my life,” he recalls. “I was a child when the Beatles happened, then I grew into adolescence and was nearing adulthood when they broke up.”
“So those events transpired in my life and in the lives of many other people as well,” he adds. “I saw Harrison in concert with Ringo playing drums, and I saw Wings on the ‘Wings Over America’ tour. But I never got to see The Beatles themselves, never got to see Lennon.”
Garris saw a connection between his story of appreciating the gift of life and Lennon’s messages of a spirit going on forever. He fought hard to use one of the deceased singer’s songs in the film, and even got so far as to meet the one true link the world still has to the legendary rock star.
“The way it was planned, the last song was going to be…” he trails off. “Well, the last line of the film is ‘Nobody lives forever, but we all shine on’. That, of course, is from the John Lennon song “Instant Karma” – ‘We all shine on, like the moon and the stars and the sun’. In the script, that was the end title song.”
“So we had to go to Yoko to get permission, and I went with my breath held,” he continues. “Apparently Yoko liked it, because she gave us the go-ahead. But we just couldn’t afford the terms that the people who represent the music put forth. Could you imagine if the last voice you hear in there is John Lennon singing ‘We all shine on, like the moon and the stars and the sun’?”
I think the [current end credit song] has a lot of emotional resonance, and the theme was the lyrical theme I was trying to play throughout the movie. I think it works really well at the end, but oh, if it could have been John Lennon.”
King shares this love for the Beatles, and has several other things in common with Garris too, even though they grew up some three thousand miles apart. Garris says it was their similarities that made the friendship so easy. “Even though we’re several years apart in age…we were both raised by our mothers under very trying financial circumstances; his even worse than mine, and mine weren’t great,” he concedes. “We both turned to writing at a very early age; I mean I was twelve when I started writing fiction.”
“We both watched the same old Universal horror movies on TV and everything we could get our hands on,” Garris continues. “Which is not to say, for either of us, that horror is our only cultural interest. Steve is a very well-read guy and is very film knowledgeable, and although horror is the realm in which I’ve had the most success, I would love to work outside of it too, and my interests there are quite varied.”
One important aspect of their partnership, however, is King’s ability to trust Garris with the stories he affectionately thinks of as his ‘kids’. “It varies,” Garris says of King’s presence on set. “For example, Quicksilver Highway was something I had written based on his story and Clive Barker’s story. He was not on set for that, but The Stand was the first time we worked together where he had written the screenplay himself, he was the Executive Producer and was around at least half the time.”
“And on The Shining, he was around two-thirds of the time, because on those two he had written the screenplays himself. He was not around when we did Riding the Bullet. I hope he’ll be around for Desperation, which he also wrote the screenplay for, but since his accident he doesn’t travel quite so much, and isn’t away from home as much as he used to be.”
Both Garris and King are excited to have another horror movie in theaters for another October. This is the time of year when people long to be terrified, and the two horror veterans are happy to oblige. “It’s an independent film with an independent distributor, so there’s no money going into television advertising; it’s all been Internet ads and newspapers.” Garris says.
“Who knows if the genre needs the kind of television support some films do,” he muses. “It’s a little tricky, because it’s not Dawn of the Dead or Texas Chainsaw Massacre.”
That may be true, but those movies didn’t have the Stephen King seal of approval. With his name attached, this is a movie that should shine on for quite some time.
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