I’m no Stephen King, but…
“I’m no Stephen King, but…” by Mathew Bonta
A big take away from adapting a Stephen King work is that I’ve come to realize that my own writing style matches Stephen King’s very closely.
Which to be honest makes alot of sense, there isn’t another writer out there who’s prose I’ve ever read more of. King is rather prolific, he’s never stopped putting out work since he started, barely a year goes by nowadays without a new King book on the shelf.
From all the novels, short stories and the film and TV adaptations I’ve been imprinted with his voice a decent amount. I can watch his characters on the screen and know what they’re thinking because I read their thoughts in the story they came from, the things that don’t usually make it to adaptation.
I’ve learned from the man himself that people are people no matter where they come from. I get my groceries from Walmart, I get my burgers from McDonald’s, I shop on amazon. Dr.Pepper is my drink of choice and when I take a road trip or visit friends and family somewhere far away, those are the things I look for to help bring me comfort and maybe those aren’t other folks’ preferred choices they all probably seek out the ones they do like best, so when I sit down to write a movie, my characters take on these same qualities.
King taught me to write human beings to act like human beings, we are flawed creatures, to err is human and boy do we err.
I chose the King story, “Mute,” to adapt. I had heard of the dollar baby program probably two decades ago, if not more and every story and book I read from then on, even when I didn’t have the means to create something, I would picture it in my head cinematically. How would this one work? Who could play these parts? How could I possibly translate, or even someone else, all these thoughts that are vital to the narrative into something we can see? Because everyone knows existentialism goes out the window when it comes to movies. It’s a visual medium, nobody wants to hear you think or narrate, they want to see you kill a guy in anger, make love with passion. Don’t think about it. Do it!
“Mute,” is a story about one man having two conversations and I adapted it into three. I usually write my screenplays from scratch, I couldn’t wrap my head around changing something that I enjoyed so much to begin with. I couldn’t wrap my head around how other people changed things in books I loved when adapting them for the big screen.
“Why did they change that? They left out my favorite character! Well this doesn’t make sense at all! That’s not how it ended in the book!”
I’ve had plenty of conversations like this after a night at the theater, the movie theater. So my approach when tackling my adaptation was a one for one retelling. Taking King’s words and formatting it into a screenplay. This is where things got interesting, “Now how am I going to do this?”
As an independent, self financed filmmaker I’ve scrapped and changed many a thing I wrote do to time and budget. A car chase turns into the aftermath of a car chase and so on, that’s why the story I chose was a simple story made up of mostly dialogue. It wasn’t a story that was a favorite of mine or something I thought said something and I could continue the conversation with a film. Just something I thought I could sharpen my teeth on with the resources I knew I had and live out the dream of being able to make a Stephen King movie. My all time favorite author since reading that first page of ‘Salem’s Lot in middle school to the last page of whatever I finished up most recently.
I’m watching my regular actors read lines that I wrote up in Final Draft and I’m looking at sets and props and costumes and it feels like any of the previous films I made, then it hits me, “I write like Stephen King.”
Now, I don’t have the talent that he has, but I live in the same headspace from all the years of his influence and I say that with pride, I couldn’t have asked for a better teacher or a better opportunity than to ride shotgun with the master, Stephen King.
Thank you constant teacher.
-Mathew Bonta – December 23; 2024
