The Breathing Method

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Deadline sez:

EXCLUSIVE: Hot off an $18 million opening-weekend gross of Sinister that was six times its $3 million budget, Jason Blum‘s Blumhouse has teamed with Sinister director and co-writer Scott Derrickson on a screen adaptation of the Stephen King novella Breathing Method. They’ve secured an option on King’s work from the author, and the script will be written by Scott Teems. They haven’t yet set it for financing.

The novella was part of the 1982 King collection Different Seasons and is the only story in the volume that hasn’t been adapted. If focuses on an elderly physician named Dr. Emlyn McCarron, who recounts an incident in his career of a patient who was determined to give birth to her illegitimate child, despite her financial difficulties and the social stigma in the 1930s. The patient turns to the doctor because of the book he has written about the Breathing Method, a system to help women through childbirth. She grows close with the doctor, who finds that she is so determined to have the child through the method that she lingers on even after a horrific accident on the way to the hospital.

Blum is poised to have two exceptional weekends in a row as Paranormal Activity 4 bows this weekend. Sinister is just as much of a genre anomaly, as only a handful of films including The Last Exorcism and the Blum-produced Insidious turned in opening weekend at such a multiple of its small budget. Breathing Method will carry a higher budget, but certainly under $20 million.

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One Stephen King Adaptation Has Been In Development For A Decade, But The Filmmakers Haven't Given Up Hope

Back in 2012, director Scott Derrickson and screenwriter Scott Teems began efforts to change that history, developing a movie based on the novella with Blumhouse Productions. And while it’s been about a decade since the project was first announced, the filmmakers are not giving up on the idea that it could exist someday in some form.

With his new movie, the critically acclaimed The Black Phone (based on the short story by Stephen King’s son, Joe Hill) set to arrive on Blu-ray next week, Scott Derrickson was recently a guest on CinemaBlend’s ReelBlend podcast, and The Breathing Method was a project that came up in conversation. The filmmaker was asked about the idea of making a King adaptation at some point in the future, and Derrickson explained that he still has hope for his big screen version of the Different Seasons novella:

There's a story of his that I was involved with, an adaptation that was actually a pretty good script adaptation that Scott Teems wrote. Who's the writer of the last, I think, two Halloween movies. Scott's a good friend of mine. And I brought him the short story for The Breathing Method, which is the fourth short story in [Different Seasons], which includes The Shawshank Redemption and The Body, which became Stand By Me, and Apt Pupil. So The Breathing Method is the only short in that book that has not been adapted yet. It's a great short story. I think it'd make a great, great horror film.

“The Breathing Method” is a strange story in that it has two different narrative levels. The narrator of the story is a lawyer who is invited to join a tremendously exclusive New York men’s club. The group meets in a gorgeous space with books and games, but the gentlemen’s true passion is storytelling.

The title of the novella comes from a tale that the narrator hears told by an elderly physician named Dr. Emlyn McCarron, who discusses his experience with a pregnant woman named Sandra Stansfield from when he was practicing medicine back in the 1930s. To help her with her labor, Dr. McCarron has her practice a technique called The Breathing Method – and while I won’t get too far into the details, I will say that the story has a macabre and creepy conclusion.

Earlier this year, I had the chance to interview screenwriter Scott Teems, and he went into more detail about the long road that the Breathing Method movie has taken through development hell. The screenwriter credits the project for helping him forge relationships with Scott Derrickson and producer Jason Blum, but explains that the development hit a brick wall because there was a point when the movie was sold to The Weinstein Company. Said Teems,

I'm trying to get it back in the works. It's a project that's had many lives, and yeah, we'll see. I optioned that story myself originally about 10 years ago. And that's actually the project through which I met Jason Blum and began our relationship, which we've now had for a decade working together. I wrote it as a movie, and Scott Derrickson was gonna direct it, and we brought Blum on to produce it. And then we sold it to Harvey Weinstein, and that was in 2013, and then it got caught up in all the Weinstein fallout a few years later.

There admittedly isn’t a high number of projects that have managed to survive a decade in development hell with the original filmmakers still attached, but Scott Teems is determined to have The Breathing Method be one of them. The adaptation has evolved over the years, and been changed for different mediums, but the writer has faith that it will one day get made in some form. Said Teems,

It's had different lives. It was a TV show at one point; it was a movie again. And who knows what it's gonna be now! I'm trying to pull it out from under the rubble of all that. I have hope for it. It's one of my favorite stories of all the King stories, and I love the adaptation and I'm excited about it. So here's hoping!