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Gerald's Game: The Motion Picture
Oculus and Somnia director Mike Flanagan has committed to next helm Gerald’s Game. Flanagan wrote the script with his writing partner Jeff Howard. Trevor Macy and his Intrepid Pictures banner will produce, as he also did on Flanagan’s two horror films.
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GERALD’S GAME is intimate and contained on a level that’s really exciting from a creative point of view. It’ll be a really strange and exciting movie for an audience, and there’s nothing quite like it. For the longest time, I’d look at that book and be convinced it was unfilmable, but I finished the script late last year and at the moment, I’m convinced it is filmable. It’s a strange one, but we’re casting that right now and hopefully we’ll be going into production on that in late winter or early spring of next year.
KATE SIEGEL: [Laughs] That’s not my decision to make, but I’m obsessed with that book. When he was writing it and I was reading the pages, I felt I’d be an excellent choice, but I think that decision falls into Trevor’s and Mike’s hands. But consider this my active pitch to play Jessie.
FANG: Flanagan talked to us about HUSH being a kind of preparation for GERALD’S GAME, since it’s also about a woman confined to a house. Did you see it that way while you were making HUSH?
SIEGEL: I did, on some level, joke that this was my audition for GERALD’S GAME, because it does require a certain amount of focus to maintain an audience’s interest for 90 minutes in a room, and of course in GERALD’S GAME she’s in a room chained to a bed. So I would have literal handcuffs as opposed to the metaphorical handcuffs of not being able to speak.
Flanagan revealed that the project could take flight at Netflix, which debuted Flanagan’s slasher movie Hush last April. “I thought the project was in danger of total stagnation for a while, and Hush really shook it awake again, because King loved Hush, and Netflix loved Hush, like Netflix loved the way it was performing. And so Netflix showed up and they were like, ‘You know what we have a lot of? Money. You know what we don’t have a lot of? [New] movies. You know, what we like to do is take risks on movies. It doesn’t matter to us if you don’t think you can get the movie into multiplexes. Hush worked. We’ve got you and Stephen King. Maybe we want to do it at a price-point that a studio wouldn’t.’ So, I don’t know if that’s happening and I don’t want to put the cart before the horse. But, yeah, the project is alive again because of that and so we’re having those conversations.”
With OUIJA: ORIGIN OF EVIL ready for its October release, director Mike Flanagan is confident that his long-mooted adaptation of Stephen King’s novel GERALD’S GAME will get off the ground next. And he’s committed to doing right by the book—about a woman left handcuffed to a bed in a remote cabin after a sex romp with her husband goes awry—knowing that the track record of King movies has been the definition of uneven.
“Stephen King has been my hero since I was a child,” Flanagan tells RUE MORGUE, “and one of the things about being a fan of his is that I’m used to the familiar heartbreak of seeing his film adaptations and feeling like something’s gone off, and that the source material I love so much has not translated properly—with obvious exceptions. It’s just that for every SHAWSHANK or GREEN MILE or STAND BY ME, you’ve got…the others, that really hurt! It’s very important for me, as a fan, not to end up in that pile. I loved GERALD’S GAME from the minute I put it down; I had gooseflesh all over my arms and my neck when I finished it, and I remember just exhaling and saying, ‘I want to make this into a movie—and it’s unfilmable!’ [laughs] and shaking my head, thinking, ‘If I could crack this, this could be one of the greatest King adaptations of them all.’ ”
Flanagan’s involvement with GERALD’S GAME (which he scripted with his regular collaborator Jeff Howard) was first announced in 2014, shortly before he began working on a secret project that turned out to be the superior stalker film HUSH. That movie’s great success as a Netflix premiere earlier this year, the director says, has helped push GERALD’S GAME closer to fruition. “I view HUSH, actually, as my most successful movie,” Flanagan says. “All of Netflix’s numbers are proprietary, so I don’t get to look at them, but the way I’ve heard people talking, it’s been viewed an amazing number of times, and the reception has been very, very positive. Coincidentally, Stephen King watched HUSH at home on Netflix and tweeted about it, which kind of blew my mind. And that got us talking about GERALD’S GAME again.
“If you know the source material,” he continues, “you’ll know there are a lot of challenges inherent in that story. Not so much the narrative challenges of how to adapt it; it took me 10 years of constantly thinking about the book to crack the cinematic version. But it’s a real challenge for financiers and distributors, who say, ‘Yeah, we love your work, we love Stephen King, but this story, this particular story? We don’t know how it works,’ without reshaping it to fit a much more conventional structure, which I did not want to do. And Netflix, because of how well HUSH has done, said, ‘We’re really interested in this, and we’d like to do it the way you want to do it.’ And that eliminated the pressure of having to test-screen the movie and define the demographic that’s going to watch it—all of that stuff that typically comes into the conversation when you’re trying to figure out how to market a film for a wide theatrical release. It just cleared the table, so that I can make the movie I want to make. I’m hoping very much that we can get that movie up on its feet soon.”
As of now, Flanagan (who hasn’t heard any updates on when his horror/fantasy BEFORE I WAKE, which recently got bumped out of its fourth release date, will hit theaters) isn’t sure how involved King himself will be in the GERALD’S GAME feature. “That’s going to be entirely up to him. From what I’ve heard, sometimes he’s very involved when it comes to approvals and things like that, and sometimes he can be more hands-off. So I guess that remains to be seen. I would personally want him to be as involved as he possibly wants to be. And I think the more Stephen is involved, the more he’ll see the reverence that I have for this book. I would love for him to be part of this, and I hope he will be.” Keep your eyes here for further updates on GERALD’S GAME.
Henry Thomas, Carel Struycken, Kate Siegel, and Chiara Aurelia round out the cast as production gets underway in Mobile, AL. Gerald and Jessie Burlingame head to their summer home on a warm weekday in October for a romantic interlude that involves adult games. After being handcuffed to her bedposts, Jessie tires of her husband’s games, until things take an unexpectedly tragic turn. She’s left handcuffed, trapped and alone as painful memories from her childhood bedevil her. Her only company is a hungry stray dog, the voices that populate her mind, and possibly someone watching her from the corner of the dark bedroom.
“Gerald’s Game has been my dream project for nearly 20 years,” Flanagan said. “As a lifelong fan of Stephen King, it is a true honor to be trusted with this amazing material. I am deeply grateful to my longtime partner, Trevor Macy, and to my new partners at Netflix, for making this dream project a reality. This is one of the reasons I wanted to make movies in the first place.”
This is Macy and Flanagan’s fifth collaboration after Oculus and Before I Wake for Relativity; Hush for Netflix; and Ouija: Origin of Evil, which Universal will release Friday. Intrepid product also includes the Stacy Title-directed The Bye Bye Man, which STX releases January 13.
Gugino is represented by CAA and Untitled, Greenwood by Gersh, Thomas by Gersh and Brillstein Entertainment Partners, Struycken by Jeffrey Leavitt Agency, Siegel by TCA/Jed Root and Nelson Davis, Aurelia by Paradigm, Flanagan by WME, and King by Paradigm.
Executive Producer D. Scott Lumpkin, a Fairhope resident, confirms the project will be shot "90-percent in downtown Mobile."
"We are shooting Gerald's Game entirely in Alabama. From last week through the middle of November," Lumpkin, says via e-mail.
Bruce Greenwood stars in the film as Gerald Burlingame, alongside Carla Gugino, Henry Thomas, Carel Struycken and Kate Siegel. Siegel, along with her husband and director of the film, Mike Flanagan, are no stranger to Coastal Alabama. Siegel stars in Flanagan's 2016 film Hush, filmed in Fairhope.
"This is our fourth film here at home in Alabama with this producer-director team. Oculus, Before I Wake, Hush and now this one," Lumpkin says.
Before I Wake is still awaiting release from Relativity Productions. Lumpkin notes that Hush is enjoying an impressive run on Netflix.
Flanagan's most recent work, a Michael Bay-produced thriller "Ouija: Origin of Evil", makes its theatrical release October 21.
The novel is one that has fallen into the “unfilmable” category because so much of it takes place inside the mind of the trapped Jessie Burlingame. But director Mike Flanagan -- of Oculus, Hush and Ouija: Origin of Evil fame -- has apparently wanted to adapt the book to the screen since he was 19, and now he’s done it. And to star in the crucial role of Jessie, he cast Carla Gugino, a favorite around these parts who has done a variety of striking roles in and out of genre films and TV, including Watchmen, Sin City, San Andreas and Wayward Pines.
“It was one of the hardest, most challenging shoots I've ever done, which is saying a lot,” said Gugino about the project when we spoke recently in Los Angeles for her new film, The Space Between Us. “I've definitely chosen some material that's been really challenging. We shot six weeks in Alabama. I think Mike is absolutely the man for the job.
“It's one of the most fulfilling things I've done,” she continued. “I love this woman…you're dealing with something that has elements of horror, but also is really more of a thriller, in the vain of a Misery. And she is also dealing with this childhood sexual trauma with her father, and those are all tricky tones to find together.”
Gugino said she was “really impressed” with the script (by Flanagan and his regular co-writer, Jeff Howard), explaining, “(Flanagan) has also reworked things to where her personality does split, but it's in a different way than that is in the novel. I think it might end up being more clear for a film.”
The actress added that the movie was shot chronologically, which helped guide her through Jessie’s mental disintegration, and she also noted, “Every step of the way, one of the things (Flanagan) said to me, which directors very rarely say, was, ‘I want you to take ownership over this, this is as much yours as it is mine’…I'm really excited about it.”
Netflix has not yet set a premiere date for the film, which also stars Bruce Greenwood as Jessie’s husband Gerald, along with Carel Struycken and Henry Thomas. But the combination of Gugino, Flanagan and King is one we’re anxiously awaiting.