You are now listening to Postmortem with Mick Garris, where the most influential voices in horror cinema will spill their guts, literally, to the renowned horror director, writer and producer.

Now, here's your host, Mick Garris.

I'm Mick Garris, and this is live Postmortem at the online Fantasia Film Festival, one of the greatest genre festivals in the world.

And I'm so happy to be talking to my friend Mike Flanagan about creating film from books and from original screenplays in that whole process.

No one is better qualified as a man who's adapted Stephen King, Shirley Jackson, and now Henry James as well.

So let's just start in with how the process works for you, the difference between sitting down with a book and turning that to the page and then the screen and the original idea concept.

Why don't we start with the adaptation issue first?

Certainly. And look, I'm so happy to be having this conversation with you, Mick, because you yourself have been through this so many times, and are so familiar as well with the pitfalls and the landmines and the challenges of it.

I think from my perspective, I very much like you as well. I'm a constant reader. I grew up not only with Stephen King, but just reading in general was a huge part of my formative years and of my life.

And before I really fell in love with cinema, I had already fallen in love with storytelling just in the movies that kind of are created in your imagination when you read a wonderful book.

I never really really thought much about what it would take to translate a story like that until I was I was much older, but I did always feel growing up that when I would read a wonderful book.

I would get lost in it to the point where I would see things, you know, I would imagine things.

I would have a really kind of contained emotional experience reading a great book. And so when I started being able to make films for a living, and the first time I actually was able to adapt something, which was Gerald's game, the process that I went through was very much about how to try to take that visual experience that I had reading the book.

And distill it into something that would be understandable and cinematic and executable, which is, you know, a whole other, a whole other facet of this.

But the priority for me is always about trying to answer that impossible question of what do you keep? What do you lose and what do you change?

It's kind of that that trifecta of stress that you hit kind of seen by seen by seen by seen by seen.

Well, in that one in particular, so much of it is internal.

And, you know, most of Stephen King's books are highly cinematic. They're very external as well as internal.

This is a movie that virtually all of it takes place in a bed in a bedroom in a cabin in the woods. So to take something that is innately literary and turn it into something cinematic.

What were the particular challenges and choices that you found you had to make?

Well, in that particular story, I mean, as you said, so much of it is just left inside the imagination of the protagonist, you know, where if you really imagine a straight adaptation of that, it would have been hours and hours of footage of Carla Gugino just thinking.

Just kind of sitting there silently and every now and then she would throw a word or two out there to kind of sign post where she was in the process.

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