Joe Hill – Horns

Drew Turney talks to the author of “Horns”, now a major motion picture starring Daniel Radcliffe.

How involved were you with the writing of the movie, if at all?

I spent about three years writing Horns and after that length of time I was ready to be done with it. Mandalay optioned it and wanted to make a film out of and they asked if I had any interest in writing the script and I said not really so they passed it onto Keith Bunin, who did a wonderful, wonderful job.

And in terms of my contributions we had a lot of great conversations when Keith was working on the script including Keith and I, Cathy Schulman who is a producer at Mandalay and Adam Stone who’s also a producer on the film. And eventually Alexandre Aja when he came on board.

We had lively arguments and broke the story down a dozen times and built it back up, it was a lot of fun. When Alex actually began filming, I viewed my role as to not get under foot and not to create trouble so I showed up on set for a couple of days to goof off and watch what people were doing and then I made myself scarce again. I came back in on the end to talk about editing, as they put the film together and I had some suggestions and some ideas. But at the end of the day, I felt like the film could only work if it was Alexandra Aja’s version of the story.

I told my version, it was time for him to tell his. I hoped that he would be true to the spirit of the characters and he was. Daniel Radcliffe and Juno Temple made sure of that. But beyond that I wanted Alex to feel free to have fun and to make a movie that lived on the screen, not something that was trying so hard to be faithful it just kind of plods along. And I think he found a nice balance.

You know the thing about the film and about Alexandre Aja, he has a very light touch. And I know that’s a strange thing to say about the guy who directed The Hills Have Eyes but he does have a very light touch. The film has this kind of lush romanticism to it. You know, I think that Alex has a romantic heart, and that’s sort of wonderful. It comes through in the film even in the most painful scenes.

So do you have the distance yourself from it to some extent because it’s someone else’s baby?

Yes, this is why I didn’t write the screenplay too. I have written screenplays and I have fun doing that but I’ve never tried to adapt my own work. And I don’t think I’d be a good collaborator if I was the screenwriter of something I spent three or four or five years writing as a novel. Because after I’ve spent three or four years meditating on a set of characters and on the situation, I’ve really got to have it my way. I just don’t think I could be flexible, I don’t think I could adapt.

I can do that if that’s my starting point. I wrote a pilot for a TV show called Dark Side which is a reboot of an 80s TV show, Tales from the Dark Side. My version’s pretty different. But I had no trouble taking notes and collaborating and working with the network on that. It was fun and exciting. And I liked the challenge of if something’s not working coming up with a fresh set of ideas. But there my starting point was the screenplay however with Horns I just spent so much time with those characters and situations. Best to stay out of the way in a situation like that.

Is it tricky to keep that distance?

Yeah, it is, I always feel uncomfortable saying this. I was in so much pain when I wrote it. And you always find people like that annoying, right? Because it’s like they sound so self-important, so full of themselves and so full of their own sense of drama, you just want to smack them up the side of the head. But I kind of understand. I was in a really bad place mentally when I wrote Horns.

It’s a really unhappy and paranoid book by a really unhappy and paranoid man. That’s not to say I’m not very proud of the book and I think it’s a lot of fun, I think readers enjoy it. But I have a hard time revisiting it. And so for me it’s actually easier to enjoy it as a film than it is to enjoy it as a book. I just don’t like thinking about where I was mentally when I wrote the story. I’m not putting the book down because I’m very, very proud of but I think it’s much easier for other people to enjoy than it is for me.

What was going on with you at the time?

Well, some of it’s a little bit private but I wound up, in the course of the book, having a nervous breakdown and getting divorced. So it wasn’t that funny. But it all turned out okay at the end. You know, my first novel was Heart Shaped Box and it was a tremendous success.

And I know it’s a cliché but fell into that second book trap and at one point I had 400 pages of a novel called The Surrealist Glass and every scene was terrible. Everything about it was bad. I was 50 pages from the ending and I threw the whole thing away. I just couldn’t stand it and I remember thinking, forget it, I’m done. If there’s never another book, there’s never another book. I don’t want to be a guy who wrote a crappy book just to have a follow up. I’d rather just be a one book writer.

And so I stopped the writing for a little while. And then at some point after I stopped writing he mental fist came unclenched. I started thinking about what I needed to make a story work. I decided that what I needed was the devil. Stories always come to life when the devil walks on stage, a character to tempt people into sin and to reveal secrets and that was sort of the starting point of Horns.

Any fears the rich inner lives of the characters wouldn’t translate to the screen?

Well, it is hard but that’s the challenge, that’s an actor’s challenge. One of the things I’ve said over and over again is that in the course of the story in Perrish the hero covers this enormous emotional terrain. He experiences grief and loss and rage and madness and delirious joy. He goes from innocence to experience and that’s a lot to do, a lot of that is internal.

But Daniel Radcliffe was able to bring all those emotions to the screen and make it look easy, make it look effortless. I always think that whenever you see an artist do something that’s difficult and make it look easy, you’re seeing someone who’s worked incredibly hard. I do think that Dan is a really remarkable young actor, and with every role he shows more range and an almost athletic range of skills. We were just so lucky that he wanted to play the part.

A lot of the movies based on your father’s books don’t work out. Did you guys talk about that?

I don’t know that it’s sensible to look at my Dad’s films and say most of them didn’t work that well. I think most films don’t work that well. I mean I think that’s actually probably descriptive of all movies, not just my Dad’s.

Certainly there have been some wonderful ones, Shawshank Redemption and Stand By Me, The Green Mile, Storm of the Century was a TV movie and that was wonderful, 1408 was really scary and really great. Of course, a lot of the earlier films too like Carrie and The Shining were well loved. I don’t think The Shining was well loved by my Dad but other people liked it.

I think that some of the films that have been made out of my Dad’s work have failed by not being faithful enough to the source material. Essentially sort of abandoning what was there and someone running off and doing their own crazy, stupid thing that had nothing to do with the original story.

Some of the others have failed by being too faithful and never sort of discovering their own internal life, just kind of like what we were talking about earlier, just being these movies that kind of plod along. The reverence for the written material was so high, that the director was never able to break through into anything of their own.

But on the whole I think there’s been a pretty fair number of films that have been really good. And usually they’ve been really good for sort of the same reasons which is a talented cast came together with a great director and they all had fun and did something special.

You know I always think every film is different from every other film, that it’s almost like a creature and every person involved is a different strand of DNA, a different rung on that ladder of DNA. And sometimes that produces a non-viable, non-living creature. And sometimes it produces something glorious and beautiful and strong and long-lived. And it’s all a matter of how those elements come together. And you really don’t know how they’re going to come together until it’s done.

So any plans or action on movies of any other books of yours?

Some good things have happened with a short story called Best New Horror. Some interesting things have happened with my novel Nosferatu NOS4A2, that I’m not allowed to talk about yet but they’re sort of trucking along in an interesting way. Universal is waist deep in the preliminary work on adapting Lock and Key as a film trilogy. My understanding is they have a pretty big chunk of the script that they’re all really happy with. My tendency is not to say too much about any possible film or TV stuff until the cameras are actually rolling because until then I don’t really believe in it.

How about acting?

Well I’m a former child actor. I was in Creepshow. I was the little kid with the voodoo doll. I mean my feeling is that particular performance was gold and so perfect that there’s really no reason to return.

I explored everything there is to explore in the field of acting with that film and there’s no reason to tarnish the greatness of that initial performance with another role. I view myself as very much like Daniel Day-Lewis, you know, years and years between parts. I mean me and Daniel Day-Lewis are almost exactly the same guy.

You definitely showed some incredible range in that role.

I think so. It was right there. Way better, way better than those, way better than those second-rate child actors who worked on Harry Potter. Oh my God, blew that right out of the water!

The Daniel Day-Lewis guy, what’s he got on you really?

Nothing. He’s got longer hair.

Even though you write under the name Hill rather than King you and your father seem happy for the worlds of your books to cross paths a little. So you don’t want to be too disconnected from his work.

Well not so much anymore. When I was a younger guy I was really insecure. I was afraid if I wrote as Joseph King that publishers would publish a lousy work because they saw a chance to make a quick buck in the last name so I was afraid of that. I didn’t want that to happen so I decided to write as Joe Hill. I was able to keep it a secret for about a decade.

In the course of that time I made my mistakes in private which is where you’re supposed to make them. I worked my craft and learned the things I needed to learn and eventually when I did sell my first book of stories, I sold it to a small press in England. I felt like it sold for the right reasons because the publisher didn’t know anything about my Dad, he didn’t know anything about my family. He just really liked those stories. Each of the short stories sold individually for the same reason, in little magazines where the editor said this is great, we really like this story, we’d be happy to publish it.

I desperately needed that, and I desperately needed that encouragement. I needed to feel like I was succeeding on my own merits, not because my Dad was someone famous. I’m a little bit more secure now and in many ways NOS4R2 has a lot of joking references to Stephen King novels in it. In some ways NOS4R2 is a book about Stephen King novels. It is a kind of response to my Dad’s book It which I loved as a kid. If you scratch the surface it’s possible to see that in many ways that NOS4R2 and It share the same underlying structure.

A brain isn’t very big. It’s just a few pounds of grey matter stuck in a very small living space and you’ve only got so much space to move around in and so you are stuck writing about the facts of your own life. You may be inventing fiction but you’re stuck using your own childhood and your own experiences and your own emotional responses to things. So it’s really impossible to have a life long career as a novelist and not write stuff that is occasionally reflective on my parents.