Lilja: What is the process of making a cover, from the time you get the offer to do it to when you hand in the finished cover art?
Mark Stutzman: The process begins with reading the manuscript. I take notes and draw little pictures here and there to keep a running list of ideas. Then I work up a bunch of thumbnail sketches to email off to the art director. We’ll hash out the good from the bad and figure out which ones have the most potential. Then I’ll work up some tighter versions of the thumbnails, say three or four, to see if they work at a slightly more refined stage. We’ll discuss these further and start to talk about color, type placement, whether the image will wrap around or just be a cover, etc. I then will do tighter versions of what the art director feels are the best ideas. At this stage we usually have our favorite and will push for that one, but we’ll still provide some options. These are often shown to the author, or at least the editor, for input. Stephen has always been great with reviewing sketches. He’s enthusiastic, but still invests the time to put in his two cents. On From a Buick 8 he broke the news to me that I had chosen an antique car from the wrong year according to the manuscript. Because he liked the car grill so much, instead of making me change it, he changed it in the book to match the art. How cool is that? On Everything’s Eventual, he came up with the idea to put “Oh God please help us” on the napkin, and for Cell he suggested adding the baby shoe to the spine, an image that got lost in the shuffle of ideas.
Once all the input is taken in I work up a final tight pencil. To do this it generally requires shooting photographic reference, or visiting junkyards as I did for From a Buick 8. For Everything’s Eventual I set up an entire dining room complete with blood. For Cell I mixed up a bloody concoction and poured it on a downtown sidewalk to reference the effect. The stain lasted for weeks and I was concerned I might get fined for destruction of public property. The art director and editor will look at the tight pencil once more and make any final comments before I go to color. The author may or may not be involved at this stage.
Finally, I begin to paint in watercolor and do the finishing touches with airbrush and gouache, opaque watercolor. The airbrush layer is used to refine and enrich the colors to give it more of an oil-painting look.
Lilja: How much time are we talking about from idea to finished art?
Mark Stutzman: This can vary greatly with approval times and deadlines. I have a cover I’ve had on hold for about a year now. The King covers usually happen in a couple of months since the publication dates are rather strict.
Lilja: You did the cover for From a Buick 8, Everything’s Eventual, Cell and now lately the cover for Lisey’s Story. Do you have a favorite?
Mark Stutzman: I think Everything’s Eventual is my favorite. I like the contrast of the pristine environment with the chaotic back cover. The single drop of blood in the water glass was the art director’s idea. The drop of blood was stolen, literally, and used on another book cover, only in a milk bottle. I guess that means it was a good idea.
Lilja: Is it frustrating to do an illustration like the one for Lisey’s Story and then see that they have only used a very small part of it for the finished cover?
Mark Stutzman: It was a hell of a lot of work, but I knew going into it what the plan was. The art director wanted the book to have more of a packaging feel, and I think it was brilliant on his part. It gives the book a presence and plays well with the story, if you’ve read it. Part of the thinking with the cover was that people often read books in public places, so the art director didn’t want the cover to be too wicked. What could look more innocent than a bunch of flowers?
Lilja: Have you done a cover that King has rejected, and if so, what was wrong with it according to King?
Mark Stutzman: So far, so good! He’s been a champ. I think the process is designed to protect everyone from going too far in a wrong direction.
Lilja: Will you be doing more King covers?
Mark Stutzman: That’s entirely up to Stephen and John. I’ll do them as long as they’ll have me! But then, who wouldn’t?
****
Mikael Håfström
Posted: January 29, 2007
With the premier of 1408 getting closer I got the chance to talk to director Mikael Håfström about the movie. Håfström has worked on movies such as Derailed and Evil. The two lead roles are played by John Cusack and Samuel L. Jackson. Here is what Håfström had to say:
Lilja: So has filming ended for 1408?
Mikael Håfström: Yes. We are deep in post-production right now.
Lilja: How did it go? Any problems?
Mikael Håfström: Well, shooting a film is never straightforward. This film, in particular, being about a guy in a hotel room and seemingly contained, was more complicated than we first anticipated. A lot of visual and special effects. It was a huge learning curve for me. (Working with John Cusack was extremely creative.) I have never done a film where a character spends so much time with only himself. It was hard work for John, but I think he liked the challenge. And I’m very impressed by his performance.
Lilja: In what state is the movie now? What is happening with it?
Mikael Håfström: We are editing for another few weeks and there is still work to do regarding the visual effects. Gabriel Yared is doing the score, and what I’ve heard so far is great.
Lilja: You said in another interview I did with you that, “In King’s short story most people see Olin as a white guy with some European background. Sam Jackson can take this guy a step further.” Did he take it a step further?
Mikael Håfström: I think he did. Sam is extremely charismatic and came to set totally prepared. He was Olin. There is a long scene in the beginning of the film between John and Sam that I’m very proud of. We rehearsed it almost as a short play and filmed it for a couple of days. It was the first time these two actors worked together, and I could see how they fed each other good energy. It was one of the great pleasures of my directorial life.
Lilja: I read that the premier was moved from May 18 to July 13. Is that the date you’re working for as well? Do you find it stressful that the premier date has been set before the movie is finished?
Mikael Håfström: Yes, it’s now July 13, which gives us some more time. But I think it’s good to have a date to work towards.
Lilja: Are you afraid that a movie with such a non-revealing title will either be missed by a lot of moviegoers or even scare them away? 1408 doesn’t say a lot about the movie?
Mikael Håfström: That’s true, but I hope the names of Stephen King, John Cusack and Sam Jackson will get people interested. And I have great confidence in the Weinsteins’ ability to market films. We already have a trailer out and there is more to come.
Lilja: Did you ever think about changing the title, and if so, to what?
Mikael Håfström: No.
Lilja: Did you get all your first choices for this movie or was there someone that you wanted but couldn’t get?
Mikael Håfström: We did not offer the parts to anyone before we talked to John and Sam. And luckily they accepted!
Lilja: I also understand that the plot of the movie has been somewhat expanded compared to King’s short story. Are you worried about how King fans will react to that?
Mikael Håfström: This will always happen when you adapt a short story. I hope King fans will feel that we are true to the heart and soul of “1408,” the short story. And I definitely think Cusack’s Mike Enslin is true to the character Stephen King writes about.
Lilja: How involved has King been in this movie? I know you told me earlier that he wasn’t at all but that he liked the script. Has that changed during the course of the making of the movie?
Mikael Håfström: No, but I read in your interview with him that he liked the trailer. That’s good news!
Lilja: OK, thanks for taking the time to talk to me. I enjoyed it! And good luck with 1408.
****
Frank Darabont
Posted: February 6, 2007
&
nbsp; Lilja: First, let me thank you for doing this interview. It’s a real honor!
Frank Darabont: Thanks for having me!
Lilja: In 1983, you did The Woman in the Room. Can you tell me how that happened? As I understand it, it’s one of the first “Dollar Babies”, right?
Frank Darabont: In 1980, I was twenty years old, working many miserable low-paid jobs just to survive and dreaming of a career in films someday. During that time I was theatre usher, telephone operator…man, I can’t even remember all the awful jobs I had back then. I even ran a forklift and did a lot of heavy lifting for an auction company that liquidated industrial machine shops. That was the year I approached Stephen King about The Woman in the Room, and I hadn’t even had my first job in movies yet! But I nonetheless decided I wanted to make a short film from his story, which I thought was lovely and deeply moving, so I wrote him a letter asking for his permission. I was shocked that he said yes. (I found out later about his “Dollar Baby” policy, which shows what a generous man he is. I doubt The Woman in the Room was the first “Dollar Baby”, but I’m certain it must be among the first wave of those films.)
Let me digress to say that my very first real job in films happened later that same year, after I’d gotten Steve’s permission to do The Woman in the Room. Chuck Russell hired me as a P.A. on a shitty no-budget film called Hell Night, starring Linda Blair. If you haven’t seen it, I don’t really recommend it. Quentin Tarantino keeps telling me he really likes Hell Night, but I keep telling him he’s the only one. It was one of the cheesier entries in the “slasher movie” cycle. But if you ever do see it, you can check out my name in the end credits—my very first movie job! “P.A.,” by the way, stands for “production assistant,” although I’ve always felt it could also stand for “pissant.” It is the lowest job in movies, a gofer who runs around doing every crappy job they hand you and never getting any sleep. I made 150 dollars a week, which was horrible pay even back then. But it was my entry into the film business, and began my association with Chuck Russell. Chuck was a line producer on low-budget films at that time, just making a living, which is how he hired me. We later became dear friends and wound up collaborating as writers on a number of screenplays, including A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors. That was Chuck’s first directing job and my first professional writing credit, in 1986.
Anyway, back to 1980. I wrote Steve King my letter, he said yes, and it took me three years to make The Woman in the Room. It took a while to raise enough money (from some kindly investors in Iowa) to shoot the movie and get it in the can. But then I had to personally earn the rest of the money needed to put the film through post-production: editing the film, doing the sound, paying for the lab work, etc. By 1983, I was working as a prop assistant on TV commercials—not great money, but it was enough to get my movie finished. I earned eleven thousand dollars that year and spent seven thousand dollars of it finishing my movie—how I survived on four thousand dollars that year is something I still can’t explain; to this day I have no idea how I did it. (The IRS was also quite curious…that was the only year I’ve ever gotten audited for taxes, because they couldn’t believe anybody could survive on four thousand dollars a year.) All I can say is, my rent was cheap and I lived very frugally. I spent that entire year with a borrowed Moviola in my bedroom, editing the film. I had heaps of 16mm film piled all over the place. At night, I had to move all the piles of film off my bed onto the floor so I could go to sleep. In the morning, I’d have to move the piles of film from the floor back onto my bed so I could walk to the bathroom. Very glamorous!
But eventually the movie did get done, and we entered it for Oscar consideration in the short-film category. There are two things we should correct: 1) It wasn’t the 1986 Academy Awards, but earlier—either ’83 or ’84, I forget the exact year. 2) More significantly, The Woman in the Room was not nominated…it was named in the top nine out of the ninety short films submitted that year, but we failed to make the final cut of four nominated films. (For some strange reason, the common belief has arisen through the years that the film was nominated, but that is incorrect.)
Lilja: Did King comment on what he thought about it? The Woman in the Room is a rather personal story to him…
Frank Darabont: He liked it. In fact, we used his quote, “Clearly the best of the short films made from my stuff,” on the video box. He did feel the character I added, The Prisoner (played by Brian Libby, who later played Floyd in The Shawshank Redemption), was a bit cliched, and I can’t disagree. Steve’s favorite bit was the dream sequence where the mom turns into a rotted corpse—he loved that! Hey, give Steve a rotted corpse and he’s your pal for life. Here’s some trivia: that corpse originally appeared in Hell Night. (If I remember correctly, Linda Blair stumbles into a room at one point where a bunch of corpses are propped around a table—it was a male corpse, but in my short I passed him off as a woman. Corpse in drag!) Some two years after Hell Night, I borrowed the corpse to use in The Woman in the Room from the makeup FX guys who built it. He wound up sitting in my living room for a few months. Sometimes I’d wake up in the middle of the night and forget he was there. I’d wander half-asleep out to the kitchen to get a glass of water and he’d scare the shit out of me, this big human shape sitting in the dark in my living room.
That dream sequence was something I also added to the story—looking back on it, I guess I took a lot of liberties with Steve’s material. I’m kind of surprised he liked it as much as he did. But he liked it well enough that when I approached him again in 1986 to ask for the rights to The Shawshank Redemption, he said yes. So, spending three years busting my ass to make that short did pay off in a very nice way. It gave Steve a certain amount of confidence in me.
As for me, I look at The Woman in the Room now and wonder what Steve saw in it. The movie actually makes me cringe a little, as I suppose any work you did as a kid will make you cringe (unless you’re Mozart). Honestly, it looks like an earnest but very young filmmaker at work to me. The result strikes me as pretty creaky and overly careful in its approach. I think I was really afraid of making any mistakes, so my approach to shooting and editing was cautious, to say the least. And it’s slow! Yikes!
Lilja: He later gave the OK to put it out on video. Whose idea was that? Yours? King’s? Most “Dollar Babies” never get out to the big public, so it must have felt good.
Frank Darabont: That was always my intention, even when I first approached him for the rights. So, yes, I was a “Dollar Baby” in a sense, but I had worked out a deal with his agent that paid Steve some more money if I got video distribution. So, he eventually made more than a buck, though it was still a very generous deal for us. Unfortunately, the video distributor we originally got into business with totally fucked us. The guy’s name was Gary Gray (not the director, I hasten to add!), this bottom-feeder with no integrity who made a shitload of money on the video but never paid us a dime of it, even though we had signed contracts. Jeff Shiro, who made The Boogeyman (which was paired with The Woman in the Room on the video), got equally screwed. Of course, I didn’t have a dime to my name back then, so hiring a lawyer was out of the question. I don’t know if Gray is still out there somewhere, but I bet he is. Any young filmmakers thinking of getting into business with him should run in the opposite direction. And Gary, if you’re reading this: shame on you. I may track you down and come after you some day with a tribe of high-priced Hollywood lawyers shrieking like crazed Apaches in an old Western, just to see the look on your face.
At some point along the way, the video got bought by Spelling’s video releasing company. I’m not even sure how that happened. I imagine it was that original distributor trying to squeeze a few more bucks out of it. Happily, Spelling did have integrity; they do business in a straightforward manner, so money started trickling in for a few years. It was a pleasure all those years later to track down my Iowa investors and send them checks. That’s all I ever wanted, to see them paid back. It took a while, but at least they got
their money. I think I might have kicked in a few bucks of my own, since I was making a good living by then.
Lilja: Then eleven years later you did The Shawshank Redemption, which became a big success and was nominated for seven Academy Awards. It’s also one of the most popular adaptations from a King story. Why do you think that is?
Frank Darabont: Well, it’s the power of the story, for sure. Steve wrote a humdinger there, he hit that ball right over the fence. It has a tremendous humanity to it, which makes for the best kind of storytelling. I recognized it the moment I read it. And it works gorgeously as metaphor—everybody who sees it can project their own trials and tribulations, and hopes for triumph, into it. I’ve often referred to it as the “Rorshach Test” of movies. People see what they want to see in it, even if they’ve never been to prison. It’s a very potent experience that way, and that’s all credit to Steve King. The man writes deep, and with that story he was writing deeper than usual. All I had to do was translate it to the screen and not screw it up. I’m probably making that sound easier than it was, but the task was made a lot easier by the fact that I had Castle Rock’s complete trust and support. That’s an amazing group of people at that company. Bless their hearts, because the level of trust a filmmaker experiences there is almost unique in this business. If I’d had standard studio interference and meddling on that movie, if I’d spent my time battling to defend my film against executives who wanted everything different, Lord knows how that movie would have turned out. Probably not so well. It would have been some crappy prison movie long forgotten by now. But I had Castle Rock, and they were just the best.
Lilja's Library Page 17