Stephen King on Why ‘Lisey’s Story’ Was One He Had to Adapt Himself
“I’ve held onto it the way you hold on to something you love,” King said about the novel, which has been reimagined as an eight-part series starring Julianne Moore and Clive Owen.
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Dig into a Stephen King novel or watch one of his film adaptations, and life’s joys quickly become life’s terrors. Cars are wicked man traps. Prom is a nightmare. Dogs? Total snuff machines.
But ask Pablo Larraín, the director of “Lisey’s Story,” the new supernatural mini-series based on King’s 2006 novel, and in King’s world, terror is joy. Larraín found that out when he visited King at the author’s home in Maine.
“He invited me to stay in a guesthouse, and he said to me, ‘You’re the only guest, but that doesn’t mean you’re alone,’ and walked away,” said Larraín, the Chilean director best known for the film “Jackie.” “I barely slept.”
“The next morning, he walked in with eggs and made fun of me,” he added. King knew he had made him afraid of nothing.
Alone, but not: It’s a theme that courses through King’s sweeping body of work, and it returns for several characters across layers of time and space in “Lisey’s Story,” which begins Friday on Apple TV+. Julianne Moore stars as Lisey Landon, the widow of Scott Landon, a famous novelist (played by Clive Owen) whose childhood traumas drove him to forge a connection to a transdimensional world called Boo’ya Moon.
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