Episode 151: The Life Of Chuck with Mike Flanagan

Put down your briefcase and put on your dancing shoes, everybody, because today on Script Apart – a podcast about the first-draft secrets of great movies and TV shows – Mike Flanagan is back, tap-dancing through the end times with me in celebration of The Life Of Chuck. As I put it in my feature for Empire Magazine earlier this year, when I covered the movie’s theatrical release, the phrase “feel-good” isn’t often associated with the apocalypse. Nor, to be honest, with Mike’s work in general, as one of the streaming era’s premier fright-masters – a writer-director whose output so far have included vampire priests (Midnight Mass), acid showers (Fall Of The House Of Usher) and some of the most harrowing small-screen deaths in recent memory (The Haunting Of Hill House, I am still not over you).

"Feel-good" is not how you’d typically describe the icon of literary terror he’s becoming closely associated with, either. The Life Of Chuck is the third time Mike has adapted the great Stephen King, after Gerald’s Game and Doctor Sleep (he also has new adaptations of Carrie and The Dark Tower on the way). But The Life Of Chuck is, nonetheless, as “feel-good” as apocalypse stories come. It stars Tom Hiddleston as an ordinary-looking man who mysteriously begins appearing on billboards as a divorced couple’s leafy suburban existence is interrupted by a series of globe-threatening disasters. The mystery of “Who is Chuck?” propels a story more still and sentimental than many viewers might expect from Flanagan, from King, from the end of the world.

In the spoiler conversation you’re about to hear, Mike calls in from the set of Carrie, which he’s in production on at the moment, to break down the film in extensive detail. We get into the meaning of the Carl Sagan-inspired monologue that Mike added to King’s source text. We talk about the one detail in the film’s transcendent dance sequence that breaks my heart just to think about. And of course, we touch on that moving, ambiguous ending and how it fits into a body of work that often involves locked rooms.

Script Apart is hosted by Al Horner and produced by Kamil Dymek. Follow us on Instagram, or email us on thescriptapartpodcast@gmail.com.

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