And then it all it all changed.
And then it all changed.
Dan is a character close to my heart both in the book and in the movie. How do you understand what drove him in the post-Overlook years? Where are we picking up from?
We meet Dan in Doctor Sleep at his rock bottom. Like so many children who come from abusive homes and from alcoholic parents, he’s gone through this traumatic childhood experience and is not surprisingly wrestling with a lot of the same demons his father wrestled with. He’s dealing with his own alcohol issues. He’s dealing with his own tendency toward violence, especially when he drinks. In a lot of ways, if you go back and you look at The Shining, Jack Torrance really embodies toxic masculinity. Dan, I think, embodies a vulnerable masculinity that I thought was so profound. It really is two sides of the same coin. The Shining is about addiction and specifically the anxiety Stephen King felt, that his alcoholism could’ve destroyed his family.
So then you look at Doctor Sleep written decades later with decades of sobriety by King, and at his own children who have grown up to be the age that he was when he was wrestling with his most ferocious demons, and now you’re looking at a story about recovery, about potential. And I love the generational saga of it.
Can you tell me about casting Ewan McGregor for Dan? And second of all, how do you direct, and how does he act, a character who’s so beaten down but is not necessarily a sad sack?
Oh, yeah. We had a couple of actors come in as candidates to play Dan. Every time, we would always talk a lot about The Shining, we would talk a lot about Jack Nicholson and we would talk a lot about Kubrick. Ewan came in, we talked about that for a minute when he first got in the room, but very quickly he was like, “Yeah, yeah, Kubrick’s really interesting. Anyway, I want to talk about recovery.” That painstaking climb up the cliff face the character has to do for the first half of the film to find his way to purpose, that’s what resonated with Ewan. It was stuff that was important and relevant to his own life, and so he was clearly the right actor for that, simply because in his mind the only conversation we’re having was all about in building the characters. The words that always came into my mind when I watched him work were “humility” and “earnestness,” I think that’s something that he just brings with him. And that’s how I think you can connect to a character without feeling like it’s a sad sack.
You kind of did something quite similar with the character of Luke in The Haunting of Hill House last year. There’s a lot of pitfalls and responsibility in portraying addiction and recovery.
Responsibility is something that we would talk about a lot. For so many people, it’s a huge part of their life. We have a responsibility to approach it as respectfully as possible and as with as much authenticity as we can so that if even one person watches what we did, and uses that to try to improve themselves in their life, we did it right.
Once again in Doctor Sleep we get a classic Mike Flanagan bummer ending. I think it’s fair to say without spoilers that things get dramatically different from the book in the end. When did you realize you would have to change a lot about where the where the story goes in that final half hour?
From the beginning, we knew we were going to have to revise the ending. I knew we were talking about changes that would be… not small. The opportunity I saw there was to dig back into the original ending of The Shining, the novel. I started to pull things up that Kubrick had jettisoned from his adaptation of King that I always wished he would have kept. And so that opened up this this new way to explore the cyclical nature of these stories: what if Dan’s story and Jack’s story, at least on the page, what if they were to be somehow kind of a hybrid? This is a story about handing the baton to the new generation. And I think there is a certain fate for Dan, and that the mechanics of our third act could take us all the way back to the original Shining novel.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
