Lilja's Library (4 page)

Lilja:
Are you concerned about how the movies turn out?  

Stephen King:
No…[laughs]  

Lilja:
No? You let them go when you…  

Stephen King:
No, I’m not concerned about that at all. [laughs] The books are still always there. It’s like what James M. Cain said: the book doesn’t change and the movies…you know…
1408
is done and the trailer is terrific and…it looks like
The Shining,
only hot instead of cold, so maybe it’ll be a great movie and everybody will make money and everybody will be happy. John Cusack’s in it and I love him as an actor, I respect him very much. Samuel L. Jackson is the hotel manager. He looks terrific and the hotel looks terrific so all those things but…so maybe it’s a success and that’s terrific. But suppose it’s junk. Then it’s gone in two weeks. And that’s the end of it. But I’m always just interested. I approach it as a fan and I know that there are writers who, what can I say, they kind of hover over things, the book is their little baby and in some cases I can understand that. It’s like Charles Frazier who wrote…you know…the book and then it became a movie with Nicole Kidman and…
Cold Mountain
. The guy has only written two books in his career, of course he was concerned, you know? Ross Lockridge only wrote one book and then he killed himself. I don’t know if he killed himself because the movie was so bad…it might have been. Elizabeth Taylor was in it and Montgomery Clift…but you only have that one baby. You get really, really concerned. Did you read Scott Smith’s book,
A Simple Plan
?  

Lilja:
No, I haven’t read that one.  

Stephen King:
Did you see the movie that Sam Raimi did out of it?  

Lilja:
No.  

Stephen King:
Ah, it’s great. It’s a great movie and it’s a great book but the thing is, Scott Smith, who wrote the book, spent six years dicking around with the screenplay because it was his only book. Now, he’s got another book out. It’s a horror novel called
The Ruins
and that’s a really nice book too. I mean it’s not nice, it’s scarier than hell, but, you know…for me I write a lot of books and I’m always interested in what the movies are gonna be. It’s like the “Dollar Babies”. I do it because I want to see what comes out. I’m like a kid with a chemistry set.  

Lilja:
Yeah, there’s been a lot of “Dollar Babies” done lately.  

Stephen King:
Yeah, and they’re fun. Some of them are ridiculous and some of them are really terrific.  

Lilja:
Yeah, I saw a Russian version of
Battleground
…I don’t know if you have seen it?  

Stephen King:
No, I haven’t.  

Lilja:
It’s animated, very funny.  

Stephen King:
I’ll have to get Marsha to send me one, but you know there’s also a claymation version of
The Sun Dog
and it’s a riot.  

Lilja:
I’ve heard about that one but never seen it.  

Stephen King:
They’ve done an off-Broadway play of
Carrie
and Carrie is played by a transvestite and it’s…I haven’t seen it yet and it’s closed, but I think it will reopen. It was quite successful. Somebody said to me, “Do you care that they kind of like turned this thing into a, almost like a camp comedy?” and I said, “No.” I really don’t care that it has that element in it and so what. Let’s see what comes.  

Lilja:
If you try enough times something good will come from some of them.  

Stephen King:
Exactly. I mean, a guy like Frank Darabont comes along and you know, Frank and I have stayed tight over the years. He’s going to start with
The Mist
in, I think, about six weeks. And that’s exciting.  

Lilja:
Are you more excited about some films than others?  

Stephen King:
Sure. I’m excited about
The Mist,
I was always kind of pumped to see what happened with
Cujo
and, of course,
Misery
. I was very excited about
Misery
because it was William Goldman who was doing the script and you know, he’s been an idol of mine most of my life.
Dolores Claiborne
with Kathy Bates again and Jennifer Jason Leigh. I was very interested to see what would happen. 

Some of them were disappointments, you know…
Needful Things
, for instance, but some of them are really fun to watch and I’m easy to please.  

Lilja:
In some movies you have small cameos. Is that something you enjoy doing?  

Stephen King:
Yeah, it’s OK if I’ve got the time to do it. I mean, I’m not a really great actor. I could probably, you know, if I had the right agent and everything I could have a career as a minor character actor sort of like Whit Bissell in the old 50s movies but…I have never been really great at it, but it’s kind of fun to do that. Frank wanted me to actually play a fairly major part in
The Mist
. But I said, “You know I can’t do that. You’re planning to go and shoot this in some Godawful place like New Zealand and I just can’t uproot my life like that.”  

Lilja:
It’s always nice to see you pop up in the movies, though.  

Stephen King:
Thank you. 

**** 

Stephen King, Part 2 

Posted: January 17, 2007  

PART 2—Duma Key, Jack Sawyer and The Gingerbread Girl
 

“They have this power so that sometimes if he paints things into the world they kind of appear and if he paints things out they disappear, including people.”  

“Of course you have to put him in some sort of situation where he has to come back and then the clock is ticking.”  

Lilja:
I understand that you have another book ready called
Duma Key
?  

Stephen King:
Duma Key
is done in first draft and it’s kind of a glorious mess right now and needs to be shorter, but it’s a good story. It’s the first of the stories I have written that are set in Florida. We have been coming down here for about eight years and I feel comfortable writing about it. Finally I said to myself, “You write all these books about Maine because it’s comfortable for you and it’s easy, but sometimes good things come from discomfort.” So I tried to do the best that I could. It’s a scary story that’s kind of sweet.  

Lilja:
Can you reveal anything about the plot?  

Stephen King:
Sure, it’s about a construction worker who is involved in a terrible accident. He lives in the northern part of the United States, Minnesota, and he’s hurt very badly and loses an arm, sustains head injuries and is not expected to live but he does and he comes out of a coma and because of the head injuries he has uncontrollable rages and memory lapses. It’s very difficult and his wife divorces him, so he decides he’s going to move to Florida, but he’s also thinking about suicide just because of his pain and because he doesn’t like being angry all the time and this psychiatrist kind of talks him out of it and one of the things he says is, “Is there anything that you do that you can use as a kind of buffer against this depression? Is there any kind of new life for you besides working on buildings?” and this guy says, “I used to draw. I used to paint a little bit,” and the guy says, “Well, try that.” And he discovers that, after this injury, that he is really a very talented painter and he moves to Florida and he starts to paint these pictures and then strange things start to happen with the pictures. They have this power so that sometimes if he paints things into the world they kind of appear and if he paints things out they disappear, including people. And there is something going on, on this island, this Duma Key, that is actually amping that talent up and making it stronger because there is something wrong there. That’s the real basis of the story.  

Lilja:
Do you expect it to be out this year?  

Stephen King:
No, I don’t think so. I’ve got to work on it and I kind of like…you know, what happens to me is, I say to myself, “I’ve got to rewrite this book and there’s a lot of work involved because it’s too long,” and I think to myself, “I don’t wanna do that, I’d rather write something new.” So that’s what I’m doing, I’m working on something new.  

Lilja:
Can you reveal anything about that?  

Stephen King:
Well, it’s a story called “The Gingerbread Girl” and it’s going to be long, I think…I don’t think it’s gonna be a novel but I think it’s gonna be pretty long, probably not as long as “Shawshank” or “The Body” or those things, but probably pretty long. 

It’s one of those stories that falls into a no-man’s land. It’s too long to be a short story and get published in a magazine but it’s too short to be a novel.  

Lilja:
Speaking of that, are you planning a new collection soon where it might fit?  

Stephen King:
Somebody was asking me about that and I don’t know what I’ve got that hasn’t been published. I’d have to think about it. If I went to Marsha and said, “Find out how many short stories are uncollected,” she could do that but I don’t know how many that is.  

There’s a story in Tinhouse called “Memory,” but that’s really the first chapter of
Duma Key
all kind of dressed up.  

Lilja:
Yeah, I remember reading that, that it was an excerpt from
Duma Key
. That was a very good story.  

Stephen King:
It’s pretty good. It’s about the guy’s accident. And there’s a story called “Lisey and the Madman,” but that’s from
Lisey’s Story
so those two are out. I don’t wanna do those, but there are a few other ones. There’s a story in Playboy last month called “Willa.”  

Lilja:
Is “Willa” something you’d want to expand?  

Stephen King:
No, I don’t think so, but I was still sort of under the influence of
Lisey’s Story
. I had a wonderful time writing
Lisey’s Story
. It was kind of magic for me and there seemed to be a little of that magic left over at the end and it went into “Willa.”  

Lilja:
Lisey’s Story
is a very nice book. One of your best books, if I may say so.  

Stephen King:
I think it’s THE best book.  

Lilja:
Yeah?  

Stephen King:
Yes, I do. Yeah, I think it’s the best one and…you just never know. You sit down to work on a book and then when I was done with it I said to myself, “I don’t really wanna write another book because it won’t be as good.” I mean, it’s like if you read a really good book, you put it on the shelf and you feel sad because you say to yourself, “I’m gonna read another book but I know it won’t be as good as this one.”  

Lilja:
Do you feel that when you’re done or do you feel it in the process, that this is about to be something very good?  

Stephen King:
You just feel it. You know when it’s going along day by day that it’s really, really good and you don’t know why…you just kind of like…write it and say, “Boy I hope this will stick that way.” But…I never had a book quite like
Lisey
and it was funny how that worked out because when I wrote most of it I was really sick a lot of the time. I had pneumonia and I picked up one of these hospital infections so that when I got out of the hospital I was just nauseated all the time, I couldn’t keep food down, I felt like crap. The book was just angelic…So that was good, but I actually literally wrote
Lisey
in between running to the bathroom to vomit what I had eaten last, and finally I shook whatever it was I had. And the book just never really lost that magic for me, and usually you write a book and you usually feel pretty good about it when you’re writing it. I usually feel like, “Goddamn, this is good, this is great,” and then it comes to a point when you have to work on it again and you say, “Oh, what a pile of shit this was, what were you thinking?” You know you always feel a little bit like you fell short but I never felt that way with
Lisey
. I felt good about that book.