Stephen King - 2021 - BBC HardTalk interview with Stephen Sackur

[Music] welcome to hard talk i'm stephen sacker millions of readers all over the world are drawn to fiction that explores our fears horror sells and no one does it better or more prolifically than my guest today stephen king he's written more than 60 books sold close to 400 million copies he is the master manipulator of dark places and the paranormal if you're not a reader you may have seen the shining carry stand by me all films based on his stories he's been writing for half a century how has our appetite for fear evolved [Music] [Music] stephen king in florida welcome to hard talk thank you very much it's nice to be here i wish we could do it in person me too but nonetheless it is a pleasure to see you on my screen and let me begin by asking you about the the threat that we all all over the world in florida in the uk all over the world are living with and that is covid19 has that invisible threat of the virus in any way dimmed your enthusiasm for writing fiction about dark places i would have to say actually not because i've been in quarantine sheltering in place for part of the time things have eased up a little bit and i've managed to get my two vaccinations yay me and uh i'm not entirely protected yet and i think that we all have to continue to take precautions but one of the things that all this solitude and uh sort of being in one place has done is freed my imagination it's a place to go a place to forget about what's going on in the world and think about anything from vampires to curses to kids who talk to dead people to any of that stuff so it's been good for me in a way and i think uh you're going to see a great uh flood of novels from writers who no longer have an excuse not to sit down at their machines but that is very interesting that the the pervasive anxiety of the society around you certainly hasn't put you off from sort of delving into the macabre the the dark the difficult and the twisted in your fiction as you've done for more than 50 years yeah well i think that a lot of people uh enjoy horror stories because it allows them to express their anxieties in ways that don't have anything to do with the real world if you see what i mean uh it gives them a chance to uh experience emotions maybe that are not allowed in polite society like aggression fear anger uh all those things are great and when you see a monster movie or when you read a scary book it allows you to sort of test drive those emotions which it's a good thing i think i think it's good to get those things out it's a kind of catharsis but of course i would say that yeah you would say that you're sort of pro scaring people and i i guess you feel that that scaring people when they're already scared is is a choice and that many people still make that choice i think that it's uh almost like uh the old time days when people would uh draw blood this way it sort of draws anxiety at least i like to think so i hope so there are a lot of psychological reasons to enjoy uh fiction that's fearful and in particular when you deal with some of the supernatural elements or the the monsters and that sort of thing we understand it's not real so we feel that it's safe enough to go there whereas when you have something like coronavirus that's very very real and one of the things that interests me is how many books came out right around the time of the coronavirus that dealt with that particular issue there's a a really good one called the end of october which deals with a pandemic that's eerily like what we're going through now but that's not the same thing that we're talking about because that's very very close to the real anxieties you you wrote your own book about a contagious highly infectious dangerous disease didn't you back in the late 1970s have you revisited that to look at the degree to which you got stuff right about the way in which societies react to that sort of invisible but pervasive health threat yes i revisited it quite a lot because the stand is a mini-series over here on tv and i think that it will eventually show in in england if it hasn't already and uh it's very eerie to see um scenes where people are wearing masks and dumping bodies into mass graves we saw too much footage over here of refrigerated trucks particularly at the height of the pandemic in places like los angeles and new york where there was just a backlog of bodies and they were being stored and that really brought me back to the story that i wrote you're going to write another virus novel no i think not i think that people have seen enough of that the interesting thing for me is how novelists are going to deal with the current situation where everybody is masking up and everybody is trying to maintain social distancing let me at this point invite you to travel back in time with me because you've talked about why uh horror and the genre that you write appeals to readers because you say it allows them to confront their deepest fears in a controlled environment but i'm interested in not the reader but the writer that is you and i'm interested in why as a very young person even as a kid you were attracted to the very dark places in your childhood writing and then as a young man in your 20s you uh your first book of course that was a great success was carrie which which you know delved into the paranormal and and was pretty dark in its own way why what was it that took you there well you know a lot of times uh when i'm doing interviews or when i'm doing uh appearances where there are questions afterwards somebody will ask uh what were you like as a kid and the subtext to that question is what messed you up so badly that you got twisted and you wrote all these horrible stories yeah people want to know whether you you are a bit of a sicko or whether there was something very dark in your childhood that took you in the direction you you went well that's very freudian and i could tell you but then i'd have to kill you i'm just kidding i think you know the thing is i was born with a big imagination and as a kid it kind of it made my life uncomfortable in a lot of ways i was afraid of the dark i was afraid of noises in the house i had nightmares i could imagine all sorts of awful things happening to me and little by little i was able to turn that uh in another direction and harness uh what had terrified me what had scared me as a kid and start to write stories that would scare other people you know in a way this is the best of all possible worlds because there are people who go to psychiatrists with their fears and they pay them a certain amount of money to get an hour it's not even a full hour it's a 50 minute hour and uh what i do is i bring these fears out and uh people pay me to read them but you know there is no good clear answer to your question it's a mystery uh but it does intrigue me that you you're sorry to interrupt stephen but it does intrigue me that you write a lot about kids kids who are often quite lonesome but they do have special powers they see things including ghostly and paranormal things which adults simply cannot see i've just finished reading your latest crime book later which is all about a kid who has that precise talent that gift did you ever as a kid feel you could somehow see things you had a gift that adults around you simply couldn't understand oh yeah i could see things and uh they were very clear and i wrote them down and uh one of the ways that you tell uh somebody who's intensely creative and as a kid i was intensely creative and i still am now but i have better control over it now than i did as a child so you know the thing is you grow up and you learn how to harness that and uh childhood was vivid for me and i enjoy revisiting that and one of the things that i like about it is that kids have a wider perspective and they're more apt to take into account the paranormal or the strange i mean kids believe in santa claus kids believe in the tooth fairy so it's very easy for them to believe that a house might be haunted talking of beliefs does stephen king believe in god the jury's out on that but as somebody famous said if you don't believe and there is one you're you're losing out it doesn't hurt to believe in god and uh so i choose to believe in a power greater than myself why not uh it seems to help and uh so yeah the reason that i the reason i'm intrigued is partly because your books you know are in in many ways about good and evil you know there are good people in your books and there are some really atrociously bad people in your books i don't know if you yourself use the word evil but if you do where do you think evil comes from well evil's a tough one and it's it's i was raised uh a methodist and i i had a very uh traditional protestant religious upbringing and i carried a lot of that to my fiction and a lot of it is about good and evil and one of the things that interests me the most about the stories that i write is how do good people behave when they're faced with difficult circumstances so i try to work on that as much as i can but when you talk about evil the question is is there such a thing as outside evil that is to say is possession demonic possession really a possible thing or is it a psychological aberration we know about inside evil whether or not there's outside evil is a question for fiction and i've written about it many times one of the things that has always struck me about very evil people serial killers like ted bundy uh the uh the moore's murders if you will in england these are terrible terrible things uh but if we put those people to death the evil doesn't care the evil just flies away into someone else and then they you're faced with uh other terrible things because we have those elements that evil is in all of us that's interesting that is the perennial question isn't it i mean it's raised in your books but it's also raised in world history what are we all of us you me actually capable of when it comes to the idea that we all have very dark and bad stuff within us that we must control we do and maybe we go to a horror movie like saw or salem's lot or to stand and we get rid of some of those feelings we find a place to put them that's safe we almost have to do that because we all have violent impulses it's part of our genetic makeup if you will so in that way i like to think that i'm serving the public interest well and we thank you for it but let if i may let me get personal with you because you you come across as a man who's done a lot of deep thinking about your own psyche and the psyche of all of us in the human race why was there a period in your life where you clearly found real issues with substance abuse and with control and addiction what what went wrong for you well nothing went wrong with me i was uh an alcoholic and a drug addict from the beginning and uh from the oh god from the time i had my first drink i just said give me some more of that and the time that i first snorted cocaine i thought to myself i found god i can remember very well i had an accident in 1999 a guy hit me with a van and i ended up in the hospital with broken bones and broken ribs and you know a concussion and a mess my leg was basically uh pencil shavings from the neon down on the right side i'm lucky to be alive and when i finally came out of it three days later the doctor said how is your pain level is it one to ten i said it's like 20 it's like 25 and he said well we have a wonderful new drug that's called oxycontin and i think you're going to find that it controls the pain and the first time i took one of those pills i said to myself this is my new addiction and i was i used that stuff for the next four or five years but that's also like imagination it's something that's hardwired i think into this into the system it's a disease and uh i control it on a day by day basis and i don't drink i don't use i haven't for 32 years so this is a better way to live but i am still an active alcoholic there's no doubt about it well i'm not active but i'm in remission yeah let me ask you how you feel american culture has evolved over the last half century because that's the span of your writing career it strikes me that when you began in the 60s you were writing in a very different context from the one that we see young people growing up in today you know the digital revolution the impact of the information flows that come with the internet social media it's it's it's changed culture so profoundly do you think it is changing the tastes of what people want to read and what you therefore need to to write well it's been a very good thing for creative people for artistic people for years writers screenwriters novelists we were in what you'd call a seller's market but now thanks to all the different streaming platforms and to audio books and to kindle books you know the books that you read on a screen everything is exploded so that we're now in a uh we're basically in a a seller's market uh there's all sorts of call for um creatives for people who can write stories and make things up basically it's everywhere and the question of whether or not it has changed the way that uh people consume i would have to say that people are a little more jaded now than they were in the old days when i started in 1974 you had some very simple things you had books that were hard covers then they became paperbacks if you were very very lucky they might become a movie but that was pretty much the end of it right there and now the choices are are very wide and i think yeah i'd have to say people are a little bit jade but do you think they're they're jaded in a different sense the sense that thanks to the phone they have and the laptop and the tablet they can access the most extraordinary and often horrifying graphic images and graphic stories at the click of a mouse or a button d do you feel that when you sit in your writing room and and conjure up imaginings for a new story you have to go further in terms of the the graphic element the violence the horror the the fear-inducing stuff do you have to push the envelope further than ever before no i don't need to do that because i'm not interested in horror per se i'm interested in people and what people do what i would like for readers for you stephen to feel when they read one of my books is i would like you to fall in love with the characters and want the best in the world for them in other words yes i'm a horror writer i won't disagree with that but i what i really want to do is to engage your positive emotions as much as i can so that when terrible things happen you don't want to see somebody's head come off i think that in a way the friday the 13th movies were almost like snuff movies you didn't go to see the campers uh at crystal lake get away uh you you wanted to see them killed and with arrows and buzz saws and chainsaws and god knows what you know i was in a a supermarket down here in florida and uh i came around a corner and there was a woman coming the other way and she pointed at me she said i know who you are you're stephen king you write all those horrible things and that's okay that's all right but i like uplifting things like that movie shawshank redemption and i said i wrote that and she said no you didn't no you but but interestingly when you talk about what really matters to you that is connecting with characters generating love from reader to character you could you know shakespeare would have said that charles dickens tolstoy all of the great writers would say just the same thing does it do you really resent the fact that you get put in this box of the highly commercial thriller guy you're not really seen as a as a literary writer a guy who actually has an enormous immense gift with words does that stick in your throat i'm too old now for it to stick in my throat but there was a time when i resented it very much and there was also a time when i believed as a younger man more naive that there was a way to build a bridge between let's say the literary uh and the and the popular that there was a way to actually have both things at the same time and i think there was a time when that did happen although even at the height of his popularity charles dickens was loved by the uh by the multitude uh by the people in the cheap seats if you will uh they crowded the docks at uh baltimore when the latest uh edition of the latest chapter of little dorit came in uh and the dock actually collapsed and people drowned because they were so anxious to see what happened next and there were the literary critics of that day felt that uh that that was just below them because there is this sort of elitist attitude isn't it at the bottom that if too many people like it it really can't be very good final thought and it brings me to the present day you have 6.5 million twitter followers you use your platform often to air your political views which are i think it's fair to say liberal and have been very anti-trump over the last few years but it strikes me that donald trump has one gift which is to use fear as an extraordinary effective political weapon his famous inauguration speech january 2017 the one that we sort of call the american carnage speech was all about using fear as a means to rally political support i'm just wondering whether you're interested in that and whether you stephen king are considering writing a poll a novel about where america is today weaving politics and fear together well i did in a way i wrote a book uh called the dead zone uh that had a character in it named greg stilson who goes from being a door-to-door bible salesman to a candidate for president of the united states and he's a terrible person and at the same time he's very much like donald trump and i was so distressed by george bush's iraq war i wrote a book called under the dome and i had a character uh in that book named jim renning who is the worst person in charge of a a crisis a disaster situation that you could possibly imagine and i wasn't thinking about bush so much as i was thinking about cheney you know everything that i write has a certain subtext because man i think that anybody who writes a long book they have to be thinking about something other than story there has to be some concern that has to do with their own life so i try to keep twitter the political stuff on twitter but in the books that subtext is there um yeah it's all it's all in there somewhere stephen king it has been a great pleasure having you on hard talk thank you very much it's been wonderful thank you [Music] [Music] you

Channel: ClubStephenKingFR

Views: 14,066

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Id: 2AiCS7YWXp4

Length: 24min 38sec (1478 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 20 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/thesouthernsavoy]

You amaze me !

We drove to Madison to visit our daughter and took the hour trip to your home.

It's a beautiful home. I love the frog statue.

It was during the filming of Castle Rock in Orange, Ma which is where my husband

And myself went to high school.

We are from Castle Rock, I hope one day to meet you and Tabitha.