The Life of Chuck Director Says Stephen King Was Very Involved in the Movie Adaptation

Stephen King’s story The Life of Chuck has a major movie adaptation from director Mike Flanagan, who is no stranger to crafting cinematic experiences out of King’s writing. Flanagan scored his breakout hit with the 2017 Netflix film Gerald’s Game, which was long looked at as a Stephen King story that was impossible to adapt into a film. He followed up that movie by taking on the monumental task of directing Doctor Sleep, a film that was an adaptation of Stephen King’s sequel novel to The Shining, as well as a sequel film to Stanley Kubrick’s controversial film adaptation of King’s book. 

With that kind of experience, it would be easy for Flanagan to go his own route in adapting The Life of Chuck for the screen. Instead, Flanagan says that he kept close council with Stephen King while developing the film – to the point that King had “an enormous amount of approvals on things like casting and other details.” 

In a longer explanation to Screen Rant, Mike Flanagan said that he and Stephen King “talked a lot before production” on The Life of Chuck. However, when it came time to make the movie, Flanagan says that Stephen King “stays very far away. He says, ‘The movie’s yours and the book is mine.’” 

Of course, even with that understanding, Flanagan still felt immense pressure to deliver the kind of film that King could be proud of. That anxiety ran all the way up to Flanagan’s first test screening of Life of Chuck, which was held for King: “I just kept trying to subtly gauge any reaction,” Flanagan said, describing King’s reaction to the screening. “If he nodded, I thought, ‘Great, it’s working!’ If he sighed or shifted, it was like, ‘Oh, he hates it!’ And that was a long movie.”

The Life of Chuck runs 1 hour and 50 minutes – a somewhat long and risky runway, given the subject matter. Life of Chuck first appeared as an unpublished novella in Stephen King’s 2020 collection If It Bleeds. The actual story is told in three acts, in reverse chronology, starting with the last moments of a man named Charles “Chuck” Krantz (Tom Hiddleston in the film), then moving backward through his life to the story of his youth and the formative things that happened to him. It’s a short but powerful snapshot of what life is, and the bad and good parts of it that shape us – so it meant something extra special to Mike Flanagan when Stephen King came away liking the feature-length cinematic tale that he created from it: 

 “I just about died,” Flanagan said, describing his reaction to King’s reaction. “Then he drove me to his house. We ate pizza and chatted in his library. He’s the nicest.”

The Life of Chuck had its screening at the Toronto International Film Festival. No further release details are available at this time.