Interview: Mike Flanagan
A /film Q&A with the writer who adapted Stephen King’s novel Doctor Sleep.
Is Doctor Sleep more of a sequel to The Shining… or its own story? That and much more covered in this /film Q&A with screenwriter Mike Flanagan whose other credits include the excellent TV limited series The Haunting of Hill House.
Why The Film is Called Doctor Sleep
Danny, since the events at the Overlook, has not used his shine. He’s tried to bury it because of the danger he thinks it put him and his family in when he was a kid. But he takes a job as an orderly at a hospice, and he finally starts to use the shining just a little bit to try to comfort patients in the moment before they die. He’s able to understand they’re about to die, he sits with them and helps them move on. It’s actually a very lovely and empathetic part of the book. Because of this, he’s developed a nickname and a reputation around the hospice. The patients know that if he shows up in your room late at night sitting by the bed, it’s because it’s over, it’s time to go to sleep. So they call him Doctor Sleep, that’s his nickname in the hospice.
What I thought was pretty great about it when I read the book, was that as a lot of you probably know, his nickname as a child was “Doc.” That was all from Bugs Bunny cartoons in The Shining. I love that King was able to make it so that the abbreviations that the patients would deal with him under was still “Doc.” That gave a whole new context to that nickname, and I thought that was a really interesting way of recontextualizing how he was referred to as a kid.
Addiction and Recovery
Not surprisingly, the events that occurred at the Overlook scarred him pretty completely. Yes, he is also prone to the same alcoholism that his father had. The novel picks him up at rock bottom, in the throes of that addiction and trying to overcome it and carries him through his recovery. I think in a lot of ways, The Shining is about alcoholism and Doctor Sleep is actually about recovery. They go together pretty well that way.
Is This Movie a Sequel to King’s Novel or Kubrick’s Film?
It’s the most common question we’ve had since the project was announced, and the question we couldn’t really answer until we had material to present, because the answer’s really complicated. The answer to all of those questions for us has always been “yes.” It is an adaptation of the novel Doctor Sleep, which is Stephen King’s sequel to his novel, The Shining. But this also exists very much in the same cinematic universe that Kubrick established in his adaptation of The Shining, and reconciling those three at times very different sources has been the most challenging and thrilling part of this, creatively, for us.
