Stephen King Had to Approve the DOCTOR SLEEP Changes Involving Stanley Kubrick's THE SHINING
It’s no secret that Stephen King hated Stanley Kubrick’s film adaptation of The Shining. So, I was very surprised to see aspects of Kubrick’s The Shining in the first trailer that was released for Doctor Sleep. You see, the novel is a sequel to The Shining book and in no way includes anything from Kubrick’s film.
When director Mike Flanagan set out on the journey to bring Doctor Sleep to the big screen, he not only wanted to honor King’s work, but he also wanted to honor Kubrick’s. To do that, to tie the film into what Kubrick did, Flanagan had to get approval from King himself.
During a recent Q&A with the director, Flanagan explained if King didn’t go for it, he wouldn’t have made the movie:
"When it came to trying to craft the adaptation, I went back to the book first and the big conversation that we had to have was about whether or not we could still do a faithful adaptation of the novel as King had laid it out, while inhabiting the universe that Kubrick had created. And that was a conversation that we had to have with Stephen King, to kick the whole thing off. If that conversation hadn’t gone the way it went we wouldn’t have done the film."
He went on to discuss King’s opinion of Kubrick’s film saying:
“As a lot of you know – I imagine all of you know – Stephen King’s opinions about the Kubrick adaptation are famous and complicated. And complicated to the point that if you’ve read [Doctor Sleep] you know that he actively and intentionally ignored everything that Kubrick had changed about his novel, and defiantly said, 'Nope, this exists completely outside of the Kubrick universe.'”
Flanagan managed to pull this off and got King’s approval, so as you saw in the trailer, the Doctor Sleep movie will unite both the literary version of the story and the cinematic version, and I couldn’t be happier! The filmmaker said:
"We had to go to King and explain how, and some of that amounts to very practical questions about certain characters who are alive in the novel, The Shining who are not alive by the end of the film. How do I deal with that? And in particular how to get into the vision of the Overlook that Kubrick had created. And our pitches to Stephen went over surprisingly well, and we came out of the conversation with not only his blessing to do what we ended up doing, but his encouragement."
Both King and Kubrick's estate were already sent cuts of the finished film, and apparently they approved of the finished product.
"That was always the hope going in, that there was some universe in which Stephen King and the Stanley Kubrick estate could both love this movie. That is the dream."
Doctor Sleep hits theaters on November 8th.
Via: Bloody Disgusting