It's not the first time that Stephen King's book has been adapted into a motion picture but he says it always feels as if it is for the first time. In an e-mail interview with Sangeeta Yadav, King tells you how he liked some adaptations and lists those he didn’t
Your bestseller Under the Dome has been adapted for a TV show. How does it feelIJ
It was a great experience. I am very happy with the way they have cast the characters. The concept of the show is also quite good.
What criterion do you follow in allowing adaptations of your novelsIJ
If they make something good out of something that I’ve done — like Shawshank Redemption or Under the Dome — I say, ‘well that’s based on my work’. If it’s okay like Silver Bullet, ‘I can say, well, I couldn’t say anything with that, I wrote the screenplay’. But with some other things like Firestarter which wasn’t particularly good, I can say, ‘well, I didn’t have anything to do with that.’
How much liberty do you give a director to make changes in your storyIJ
I’m a go-along guy. When I was a child, my mother used to say, ‘Stephen, if you had been a girl you’d always be pregnant’. As long as you don’t cast a 12-foot tall transvestite basketball player as Dale Barbara, I’m going to be okay with what you do.
Which were the adaptations you were most pleased withIJ
Shawshank Redemption, Misery, Stand by Me, The Mist. One that doesn’t get a lot of play is Cujo with Dee Wallace and that’s a fantastic movie. It’s absolutely fantastic.
nHow is your book relevant in today’s worldIJ
We’re all under the dome because so far as we know, this little tiny blue world is all we’ve got. There’s nowhere else to go. You can go to Mars and you can land a rover on there but what they find essentially is dirt with no microbes or anything in it. So I thought, this is what we’ve got and resources are finite. Population is exploding. The environment is degrading. And if you put one little town in Maine, because Maine is what I know, if you put them under the dome, you create this perfect metaphor for everything that we are facing in the macrocosm.
What are you reading at the momentIJ
I am reading Agatha Christie’s Summertime and I am loving it.
Any recommendations for our viewersIJ
The Kate Atkinson novel life After life is a terrific read. There’s also a hard-boiled mystery called Gun Machine by Warren Ellis.
What is your writer’s routineIJ
I write in the mornings, in bright daylight. But I get most of my good ideas after the sun has gone down. I write 1,500 words in the mornings. Five pages a day, that’s usually what I get through. It’s obsessive-compulsive more than anything. I’m scared to death that if I leave it alone, the colour will go out of it. It’ll start to look fake.
Your sons write too...
My son Owen’s new novel Double Feature is very, very funny and it’s a bighearted book. And my son Joe, who writes under the name Joe Hill, has a new vampire book out called NOS4A2. It pulls you in and keeps you in.
Watch Under the Dome on BIG CBS lOVE every Friday at 10 PM.