DOCTOR SLEEP Director Mike Flanagan Discusses Recasting Characters From THE SHINING

As you know, director Mike Flanagan’s adaptation of Stephen King’s Doctor Sleep will directly tie into Stanely Kubrick’s The Shining. There are going to be a good amount of flashback scenes that will feature characters from the original Shining film and those characters needed to be recast.

I can only imagine the pressure that Flanagan was feeling when he was recasting these roles almost forty years after the original movie was released. But, he opted to recast those characters instead of bringing them back to life with the use of CGI technology.

During an interview with CB, the filmmaker talked about all this saying that it was the hardest part of the process:

"That was the hardest part of this, I think, because the only other option is to do some kind of digital thing where you try to recreate another actor and I don't feel like the technology is quite there yet. It always distracts me and I always start looking at the tech, so I didn't wanna do that."

I agree with the technology not being there yet to recreate these characters digitally. He went on to talk about recasting the roles, and how he didn’t want people to come in to do impressions:

"I didn't want people to come in and do an impression, I waned people to come in and do their version of Wendy Torrance or Dick Hallorann. Because we're using so much of the visual language of the [Stanley] Kubrick film, I wanted these actors to remind me of Shelley Duvall and of Scatman Crothers and that was enough, if they could have just a couple of notes that reminded me of those other actors and then, take the character over from there into a new place, that's what I wanted. I hope we pulled that off. It's gonna be one of the more controversial aspects of the movie, to be sure."

It’s going to be a little weird to see these characters being played by other actors, but I’m curious to see how things ended up working out. I hope that Flanagan and the actors he cast manage to pull it off because it’s not going to be easy. They have to sell us that these are those characters!

The filmmaker went on to talk about adapting the novel and his process of picking things out from it to fit in the film’s 2.5 hour run time:

"Whenever I'm doing an adaptation, I keep the book open next to me while I'm writing and I go through and I highlight everything in the book that I wanna make sure, even if it's a line of prose or a line of dialogue, everything in there that I wanna make sure is gonna survive into the screenplay. But the big question is always, 'What are the fans going to want?' In this case, there were two kind of disparate groups of fans and it was like, what are the Kubrick fans gonna expect, what are the King fans gonna expect? Those camps, some of them have been at odds for a really long time over this very property. At that point, it was really like, how do we give enough to one side, to the other side to try to bring them together."

It seems like Flanagan might have actually pulled this off as Stephen King told him that he loved it after sitting next to him in a screening watching it. That must’ve been a little nerve-wracking!

Doctor Sleep continues the story of Danny Torrance, 40 years after his terrifying stay at the Overlook Hotel where his dad died trying to kill him.

Still irrevocably scarred by the trauma he endured as a child at the Overlook, Dan Torrance has fought to find some semblance of peace. But that peace is shattered when he encounters Abra, a courageous teenager with her own powerful extrasensory gift, known as the “shine.” Instinctively recognizing that Dan shares her power, Abra has sought him out, desperate for his help against the merciless Rose the Hat and her followers, The True Knot, who feed off the shine of innocents in their quest for immortality.

Forming an unlikely alliance, Dan and Abra engage in a brutal life-or-death battle with Rose. Abra’s innocence and fearless embrace of her shine compel Dan to call upon his own powers as never before—at once facing his fears and reawakening the ghosts of the past.

Ewan McGregor takes on the role of Dan Torrance, Rebecca Ferguson plays Rose the Hat, and newcomer Kyliegh Curran plays Abra. The ensemble cast also includes Carl Lumbly, Zahn McClarnon, Emily Alyn Lind, Bruce Greenwood, Jocelin Donahue, Alex Essoe, and Cliff Curtis.

Doctor Sleep is slated for release on November 8th, 2019.