Interviews
Mike Flanagan on How ‘Doctor Sleep’ Changes the Way We Understand Jack Torrance [Interview]
The trickiest thing about Doctor Sleep, the new motion picture sequel to The Shining, is that it’s a sequel to Stanley Kubrick’s classic movie and also Stephen King’s classic novel. The two versions are very similar, but there are distinct differences in plot and, most controversially, the portrayal of struggling alcoholic writer Jack Torrance, who goes mad over the course of an isolated winter in a haunted hotel, and tries to kill his wife, Wendy, and his son, Danny.
King’s sympathetic portrayal of Jack Torrance and Kubrick’s sinister interpretation of the character have been at odds for decades, but in the new sequel Doctor Sleep, director Mike Flanagan tries to find the connective tissue between the two vastly different interpretations of the character. And somehow, amazingly, it works.
But, as we learned in a new interview at Bloody-Disgusting, it wasn’t easy. But before we can learn how he connected the two versions of Jack Torrance, we have to look at what, in Flanagan’s mind, the real difference is between them.
“I would say the key difference is The Shining, as King wrote it, is an expression of is anxiety of what his alcoholism would do to his family if he did not get it under control. I think that is the beating heart of the book that he wrote,” Flanagan explains.
“I think the film Kubrick made is about the unending march of madness that can seize and control us, about toxic masculinity and how it can destroy a family, and how this insanity can all be exacerbated by taking three people who are meant to love each other and putting them in a space without any other contact with the outside world,” adds Flanagan.
“Both of those are chilling visions of that story, and I think in particular you if you look at what happens, they both culminate in Jack Torrance chasing his son with the intent to kill him, right? So they all come back to the same place. But the differences there are ones of optimism,” Flanagan says.
“Because when King tells that story, and Jack Torrance corners Danny, he can’t do it. He has a moment of lucidity. He can’t bring himself to harm his son. His parental love trumps all. He sacrifices himself to save his family, right?” Flanagan reminds us. “In Kubrick’s world, equally scary idea, he never looks back for a second. The only thing that stops him from killing his son is opportunity and temperature. That’s a terrifying idea. I think that they’re both scared of very different things.”
Of course, those are vastly different takes on what makes Jack Torrance work, and according to Flanagan, finding a “common ground” wasn’t necessarily on the table. As a film that uses scenes and iconography from Kubrick’s The Shining, Flanagan’s Doctor Sleep has to adhere to Kubrick’s vision… up to a point.
“Jack Torrance, I don’t know that we could find common ground. I think the challenge for me was, in doing the film the way we did it, Kubrick’s film is canon, right? So we can’t change Jack. We shouldn’t change Jack,” Flanagan says.
“The answer, though, was that some of those moments that King never got – the ones that he was very specific about missing from that adaptation – there was a chance to give them to Dan,” Flanagan says. “There was a chance for his son to have that arc that Jack never had. So that was a neat opportunity that presented itself with this.”
In Doctor Sleep, Jack Torrance’s son Danny is now played by Ewan McGregor, who like his father has succumbed to alcoholism and is struggling with his addiction. But, perhaps ironically, Dan’s own personal tragedy is what makes him finally able to connect with his father on a personal level. In the film Dan reveals as much at an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting, where he imagines that Jack must have once stood where he stood, trying to get his life together.
“And that humanizing his father in his own eyes, in choosing to remember that moment – which in the timeline is very close to the moment when he tried to kill him – that spoke to me when it comes to how children process trauma, especially trauma visited upon them by their parents,” Flanagan says of the AA meeting. “Part of any kind of recovery, and we’re seeing Dan at a very specific station in his recovery, [is] being able to look at his father as a person and not a monster. [It’s] pretty important.”
Doctor Sleep proposes that Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining happened, but also that King’s interpretation of Jack Torrance is still intact. The scenes from the original film, as used in Doctor Sleep, have more to do with Dan’s subjective memories of that horrifying childhood trauma, and only in growing up has he begun to see the nuance in his father that King’s novel made more explicit.
“That’s exactly right,” Flanagan confirms. “We would talk about that a lot too, the difference between what we remembered from the story of The Shining versus what Dan remembers.”
Check out Doctor Sleep in theaters to see more of how the film combines King’s and Kubrick’s visions, and decide for yourself what to believe about The Shining.
Interviews
‘Rubberhead’ Director Nick Taylor on FX Maverick Steve Johnson, Practical Effects, and Seven-Year Journey
Horror journalist, producer, and podcast host Nick Taylor moves into the director’s seat for his feature debut with illuminating documentary Rubberhead: The Life & Monsters of Steve Johnson.
It chronicles the wild life and career of SFX maverick Steve Johnson, based on the multi-volume book series Rubberhead: Sex, Drugs and Special FX, and those familiar likely already know Rubberhead isn’t your standard horror documentary.
Johnson is responsible for so many memorable movie monsters, having worked on Fright Night, Poltergeist II, An American Werewolf in London, A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master and Night of the Demons, to name a few. He’s also extremely candid in ways that feel atypical in this industry, open about his failures as much as his successes.
“It was a natural progression for sure,” Nick Taylor tells Bloody Disgusting of his transition into filmmaking ahead of Rubberhead‘s world premiere next week at the Fantasia Film Festival on July 23. “I think with my podcast, I got adept at interviewing people and pulling creative lessons out of them, which was the point of my podcast. I wanted this movie to be sort of a creativity pill for artists where if they’re starting a project or feel creatively stuck, they could watch this movie and be inspired and get actual practical creative lessons.”
Taylor’s background in PR and marketing also organically led him down this path.
He charts the course from book promo to documentary director: “But also Bloody Disgusting had a lot to do with this movie because in the very beginning when I first met Steve, I was helping him promote his book and I said, ‘Hey, I got a marketing background and a journalism background. Let me help you promote this book. I’ll just pitch stories from your life to the media, and we’ll see what happens.’ And John Squires wrote an article about Steve making Slimer under the influence of tons and tons of cocaine, and that went fairly viral.”
“For a week, it was story time with Steve,” Taylor continues. “He would tell me a story from his life, and every story was about a major movie, a major director, lots of drugs and alcohol and insanity. I would write them up, and I think John published about three or four of them. So huge shout out to John Squires because that was really great. So yeah, there were definitely a lot of outgrowths of my journalism background that definitely contributed to this movie.”
Rubberhead condenses the multi-book series into a cohesive feature film with a breezy runtime, sparking the obvious question as to how Taylor approached condensing Johnson’s life down to an under 2-hour documentary film.
“That was one of the more difficult parts of all of this, because we had enough for a series or an epically long six-hour fan documentary,” he answers. “But from day one, I did not want to make a fan documentary. I love them. They’re a lot of fun, but I did want the movie to stand on its own two feet as a character-driven portrait of an artist and a time period and a technology, that being practical effects. I did want to be objective. I didn’t want to make this too long. I wanted to make it re-watchable. So I think we just really had to focus on what the narratives were that we wanted to tell. So there were some basically almost cliché archetypical mythic narratives present in Steve’s life. We could have made this way longer, but we wanted to keep it short. But luckily that’s why you have special features.”
Johnson quickly proves to be an engaging subject thanks to his self-effacing wit and frank self-reflections; expect no shortage of stories about how drugs factored into the height of his career or the failures it wrought.
That rare quality was an asset for Rubberhead, Taylor confirms. “He does not shy away from anything about the drugs, the addiction, the bridges burned, the mistakes made, the lessons learned. He just is honest about all of it. He’s had a lot of time for reflection, and he’s done a lot of reflection, so he doesn’t shy away from any of it, which is huge because it’s very refreshing. I don’t think a lot of people are that way, at least in this industry from what I can see. So I think it was hugely beneficial. We wanted to lean into that, and we wanted to make this sort of a gonzo Hunter S. Thompson sort of wild tale through Steve’s overall life.“
Condensing his life into this doc was a slow and steady process for Taylor, too. “It’s been almost seven years. It’s been a labor of love. We’ve been as indie as it gets. We would shoot what we could when we could, and then we would edit when we could. Then after a while it all came together.”
In a way, making Rubberhead brings Taylor’s horror fandom full circle. It turns out that the very film that sparked his interest in the genre and practical effects also comes with an amusing Steve Johnson anecdote.
Taylor explains, “My gateway for sure was Beetlejuice. I saw that at a very young age; I think I was four or five. I felt somebody had shown me, my soul. I get a little emotional thinking about it. There was something about that movie that felt so strange and unusual, but also felt so familiar. It was spooky, but it was fun, and it was lighthearted, and it had humor, but it also had this macabre celebration to it that I just really got into as a kid. I felt somebody had shown me my own soul. And funny story, Steve got fired from Beetlejuice because Tim Burton gave him his hand-drawn designs and Steve’s like, ‘Oh my God, these look like kids did them. This is not what you want. I know what you want. I’m going to redesign these for you.’ And Tim Burton was like, ‘Yeah, no, you’re not.’ So yeah, funny story.”
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