Stephen King: The Rolling Stone Interview
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Your dad died in 1980. Were you ever tempted to meet him, if only to hear his side of the story?
No. I was curious when I was a kid. I used to think, “I’d like to find him and knock his fucking head off.” And then later on, I thought to myself, “I’d like to find him and hear his side of the story and then knock his fucking head off.” Because there’s no excuse for it. It wasn’t just that he walked out and left us – he left her holding a whole bunch of bills, which she worked to pay off.
What stopped you?
I was too busy. I was trying to carve out a career as a writer. And when I was teaching school, I would teach and come home and try to steal a couple of hours to write. To tell you the truth, man, I never thought about it that much.
Did you see that new documentary “Room 237” about obsessive fans of Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining?
Yeah. Well, let me put it this way – I watched about half of it and got sort of impatient with it and turned it off.
Why?
These guys were reaching. I’ve never had much patience for academic bullshit. It’s like Dylan says, “You give people a lot of knives and forks, they’ve gotta cut something.” And that was what was going on in that movie.
You’ve been extremely critical of Kubrick’s film over the years. Is it possible he made a great movie that just so happens to be a horrible adaptation of your book?
No. I never saw it that way at all. And I never see any of the movies that way. The movies have never been a big deal to me. The movies are the movies. They just make them. If they’re good, that’s terrific. If they’re not, they’re not. But I see them as a lesser medium than fiction, than literature, and a more ephemeral medium.
Are you mystified by the cult that’s grown around Kubrick’s Shining?
I don’t get it. But there are a lot of things that I don’t get. But obviously people absolutely love it, and they don’t understand why I don’t. The book is hot, and the movie is cold; the book ends in fire, and the movie in ice. In the book, there’s an actual arc where you see this guy, Jack Torrance, trying to be good, and little by little he moves over to this place where he’s crazy. And as far as I was concerned, when I saw the movie, Jack was crazy from the first scene. I had to keep my mouth shut at the time. It was a screening, and Nicholson was there. But I’m thinking to myself the minute he’s on the screen, “Oh, I know this guy. I’ve seen him in five motorcycle movies, where Jack Nicholson played the same part.” And it’s so misogynistic. I mean, Wendy Torrance is just presented as this sort of screaming dishrag. But that’s just me, that’s the way I am.
What’s the best movie ever made from one of your books?
Probably Stand by Me. I thought it was true to the book, and because it had the emotional gradient of the story. It was moving. I think I scared the shit out of Rob Reiner. He showed it to me in the screening room at the Beverly Hills Hotel. I was out there for something else, and he said, “Can I come over and show you this movie?” And you have to remember that the movie was made on a shoestring. It was supposed to be one of those things that opened in six theaters and then maybe disappeared. And instead it went viral. When the movie was over, I hugged him because I was moved to tears, because it was so autobiographical.
But Stand by Me, Shawshank Redemption, Green Mile are all really great ones. Misery is a great film. Delores Claiborne is a really, really good film. Cujo is terrific.
What do you make of this surge in sales for young-adult books? There’s a whole school of critics that say too many adults are reading them.
It’s just crazy. I read all of the Harry Potter books, and I really liked ’em. I don’t approach any books in terms of genre saying that “This is young adult,” or “This is a romance,” or science fiction, or whatever. You read them because you read them. Someone asked me recently, “Have you ever considered writing a book for young people? You know, a YA novel?” And I said, “All of them.” Because I don’t see that genre thing.
Do you think you have fewer young readers than you had back in the first few decades of your career?
Yes, that’s probably true. I’m seen as somebody who writes for adults because I’m an older man myself. Some of them find me, and a lot of them don’t. But I came along at a fortunate time, in that I was a paperback success before I was a hardcover success. That’s because paperbacks were cheap, so a lot of readers that I had were younger people. Paperbacks were what they could afford. You do say to yourself, “Well, are the younger readers coming along in terms of the e-books, the Kindles and all that stuff?” And the answer is, some of them are, but a lot of them probably aren’t.
Does that bother you?
Well, I have a drive to succeed. I have a drive to want to please people, as many people as possible. But that ends at a certain point where you say, “I’m not going to sell out and write this one particular kind of thing.” I had a real argument with myself about Mr. Mercedes, which is basically a straight suspense novel.
I had to sit down and have a discussion with myself and say, “Do you want to do what your heart is telling you you should do, or do you want to do what people expect? Because if you only want to write what people expect, what the fuck did you do all this for? Why don’t you write what you want to write?”
Do you worry about the death of print?
I think books are going to be around, but it’s crazy what happened. They’re worried in the publishing industry about bookstores disappearing. Barnes & Noble creating the Nook was like Vietnam; they should have left that alone because Amazon got there first with the Kindle. The death of the music business was insane, but audio recordings have been around now for maybe 120 years. Books have been around for, what, nine centuries? So they’re more entrenched than music.
Speaking of Harry Potter, you’ve become friendly with J.K. Rowling, right?
Yeah. We did a charity event at Radio City Music Hall a few years back. She was working on the last of the Harry Potter books. Her publicist and her editor called her over, and they talked for about 10 minutes. And when she came back to me, she was steaming. Fucking furious. And she said, “They don’t understand what we do, do they? They don’t fucking understand what we do.” And I said, “No, they don’t. None of them do.” And that’s what my life is like right now.
What do you mean?
When someone says, “What are you working on?” I’ll say, “I’ve got this wonderful story about these two families on two sides of a lake that end up having this arms race with fireworks,” but I’m doing this event, and then I’ve got the political ad and all this other crap. So you have to be stern about it and say, “I’m not going to do this other stuff, because you’ve got to make room for me to write.” Nobody really understands what the job is. They want the books, but they don’t, in a way, take it seriously.
You mentioned watching a lot of TV. What’s the best show of the past 15 years?
Breaking Bad. I knew it was great from the first scene you see him wearing jockey shorts. I thought it was amazingly brave since they look so geeky.
Stephen King: The Rolling Stone Interview, Page 5 of 6