Mike Flanagan Didn’t Want to Remake Carrie

Our product picks are editor-tested, expert-approved. We may earn a commission through links on our site. Why Trust Us?Amazon Prime; Men's Health Illustration/Jason Speakman13 min readWHEN MIKE FLANAGAN was first presented with the possibility of adapting Stephen King’s Carrie into a new series, he had a quick answer: “Nah.”“Why?” he recalls asking, “I didn’t see the need.” Like everyone else, Flanagan is a colossal fan of the 1976 Brian De Palma-directed take on King’s iconic debut novel. Why would anyone want to go up against something as foundational as that?But as time went by, he kept coming back to the idea. He thought about his oldest son, who was about to start high school, and how different that experience would be from the one he had in the ’90s, and the one that existed in the ’70s, when King’s Carrie novel was first released. He was thinking about a story out of Albany, California, where a bullying Instagram account created by a high school student essentially destroyed an entire community. And he was also also thinking about a 2018 case that involved revelations that 13 children had been imprisoned and tortured by their parents in the family home for essentially their entire lives.As he thought about Carrie, these three things kept circling his mind—and eventually revealed to him a way to bring this story into modern times. The horrors of King and De Palma’s takes on Carrie are evergreen and universal, but people today have a litany of new ones to deal with, too.Gareth Cattermole//Getty Images“So, my first question of: Why do you remake Carrie?” he says, “the answer I came up with was you don't—you do something new, and you use Carrie and the structure and the characters that we think we know as a way to usher this story into being.”Flanagan has adapted stories this way before, to great success. His Netflix series The Haunting of Hill House and The Fall of the House of Usher were based on the works of Shirley Jackson and Edgar Allan Poe, respectively. Flanagan took the bones of those stories and applied them to modern characters and their struggles. It’s a style of adaptation that may frustrate the purists, but always helps to create something new for viewers.“One of the things about stories that endure is that they have something in them that is cyclically true,” he says. “They have something in them that keeps coming up and you keep seeing echoes of. And so I love when I see an event in the real world that makes me think of something that was written 100 years ago.”The story of Flanagan’s Carrie is broadly the same—with some twists mixed in: Carrie White (Summer H. Howell) goes to public school for the first time after her conspiracy theorist father dies in a construction accident, and it’s discovered that he’s been keeping Carrie and her mother, the devoutly religious Margaret (Samantha Sloyan, a Flanagan regular), locked up in their home. At school, Carrie runs into the characters everyone knows if they’ve ever taken in any version of this story: the kind(ish) Sue Snell (Siena Agudong), the bully Chris Hargensen (Alison Thornton), popular jock Tommy Ross (Joel Oulette), and the troublemaking POS Billy Nolan (Arthur Conti). Flanagan’s new version also fleshes out some of the adult characters, including gym teacher Ms. Desjardin (Amber Midthunder) and school principal Mr. Grayle (Matthew Lillard).Robert Falconer//Amazon PrimeIn expanding to eight episodes ranging between 45 minutes and an hour, the show also allows for deeper dives into characters who previously were only seen briefly. Chris, for example, is just as ruthless and cruel as ever (and played to perfection by Thornton)—but there are also scenes that invite us to empathize with her own plight as a struggling teenage girl. Things are similar for Desjardin and Grayle, characters beefed up from their past counterparts and played with naturalistic complexity by Midthunder and Lillard. You might know the Carrie story, but you haven’t seen it told this way before.With Carrie now streaming on Prime Video, Men’s Health spoke with Flanagan about taking the iconic story on, comparisons to Brian De Palma’s version, his friendship with Stephen King himself, and where this story could go from here.MEN’S HEALTH: Carrie is focused on female characters, but a number of men play key roles too. I felt like your Billy Nolan character, for example, was much closer to the dark figure he is in the book, as opposed to John Travolta’s portrayal in the 1976 movie being a little goofier. How did you go about bringing those characters into our modern world? MIKE FLANAGAN: It's a story of female empowerment, but it also has some fantastic male supporting roles for sure. I agree with you on Billy Nolan—I do think Travolta goofified him a bit, made him a kid. In the book, he's a prototype for this villainous character that King is going to return to a few times. His Billy Nolan is not too many steps removed from what becomes these psychotic characters he creates, like Ace Merrill. And so I was excited for that version of Billy.Amazon PrimeIn this version, Chris and Sue are best friends since they were kids—that's not the way it is in the book, either. So Chris has Sue pulling her more into the light, and I really wanted her to have a counterbalance for that, and that was Billy. But because we didn't want it to feel like all the male characters are pulling our female characters toward an abyss, on the other hand, you've got someone like Matthew Lillard who, of all the characters, embodies maybe the softest and kindest of them. Same with Tim Bagley, who plays Mr. Morton, the guidance counselor. There are deep wells of kindness and empathy there. There's a whole spectrum we want to play with that.In previous versions, Tommy is a very transactional character with Carrie White. He's told to take her to the prom and it's just something he goes along with. In this, there's a great scene, and I love the way Joel plays it. It's very early on in the second episode, where all the kids are gathered around the cell phone footage of Carrie, and everyone's watching with the same kind of amused shock, and they're laughing. And Tommy Ross is the first character on the whole show who's like, "That's rough. Is she okay?"Robert Falconer//Amazon PrimeHe's one of the first people that shows genuine concern for her. And I believe very much that by the end of the show, they're friends and it's his decision to bring her to the prom. He does it not in some way where he's interested in her romantically, and it's not exploitative of her. It's legitimately because, in a friendly way, he thinks she deserves to have a good night and to be out. Joel portrayed that unselfishness really wonderfully.MH: Stephen King is a producer on the show. When you’re going about changing something from the source material, how does that go with him?MF: That actually was one of the first conversations I had with him, about whether we were going to do this. Because his first reaction was the same as mine and the same, I think, as everybody's, which is “Why?” And I laid it out. The changes were what excited him, because I think he loved De Palma's movie. It'd already been done. Changes were the thing that got him to sit forward and be like, "Oh, well, this could be actually really interesting. This could be really different."He had a lot of really cool questions and ideas, especially about the other women in the show who may or may not be part of this sorority of powerful women that Carrie learned she's a part of. He was involved at every turn when it came to approving the shape of the season, the major character and plot changes, then every script, then every casting decision, and then every episode when we finished editing all goes to him. He was very excited throughout.MH: How would you describe your relationship with him, now having done four adaptations?MF: I'm happy to say that we are friends, which is a very strange thing to say out loud. Actually, I just got back to New York. We spent the night in Maine at his place last night after a really terrific dinner with him and his wife, Tabitha.And sitting there, it was like, Wow, we're friends. This is amazing. But yeah, one thing is I think we trust each other quite a bit, and I take that trust so seriously. It's a relationship I have no interest in damaging. And so any creative decision, any decision when it comes to what we will and won't adapt and how, making sure that I'm not betraying the trust he puts in me is my first priority.Mathew Tsang//Getty ImagesMH: I’m fascinated by the way Carrie and Margaret’s relationship evolves in this series. Margaret is still monstrous and often out of control, but she’s also kind of right about things a few times too… MF: We were all of the same mind that we'd seen the version so many times where Margaret fears and hates Carrie, and Carrie fears Margaret, and it was a relationship built on abuse. And so for us, it was so much more exciting to say, What if this is based entirely on love, a ferocious love, in Margaret's case? She loves her daughter so much. Her daughter's the only reason she lives in this. It's her whole reason to breathe every day, but she doesn't know how to keep her safe.So we wanted to start these characters as so close—like they've been each other's whole worlds—and then we're going to watch the tension that happens as they both venture out into the greater world and Carrie's excited to go and Margaret's terrified of it. And what Samantha and Summer create between them is, for me, the heart of the show, and I think it's the best performance Samantha Sloyan's ever given. But it's just a very different dynamic.I was also shocked by how often I agreed with Margaret White on the page, with things she said, not with choices she made, necessarily, but some of her points, I was like, "Oh no, I agree with Margaret White!" That's not a comfortable thing to say. But yeah, it's true. It's such a different version of both of those characters that I think their love for each other is what makes the show so tragic.Liane Hentscher//Amazon PrimeMH: It’s also really interesting how much your show fleshes out the Chris character, as the villain of the story. MF: There’s something else from the book, right up front, that Stephen King says three times, and so we took it and put it right into the front of the show. Sue Snell says, "We were kids. We were kids. We were kids trying to do our best." And I don't think you can apply that to Chris Hargensen in a lot of the other iterations. She's just a monster. She's not trying to do her best.And so in this one, our thought was What if she was? And we loved the idea that under different circumstances, in a different year with just enough small little things changed, they might've actually been friends. When you're telling a story about Chris Hargensen as the soulless monster and Carrie as this eternal victim, you're telling a horror story. But if you're telling a story about relatable human beings who make bad decisions and the cycles of cruelty, then we're telling a tragedy, and that's what we were more interested in.Gareth Cattermole//Getty ImagesI also think, in our hope that this would be a show that inspires conversations about the choices between kindness and cruelty, especially with young people and especially in high school, that we didn't do them any favors by trying to put a story out there that said, "Your tormentors are just evil and not worth understanding, and you should just seek the biggest, loudest revenge you possibly can imagine." That seems like a wildly irresponsible position.I saw some write-up that said, "In today's world, this show is a plea for kindness and what we need is a scream." And I couldn't disagree more with that writer. I was like, what an irresponsible position to take when you talk about kids and school violence that we want to try to say, "Nope, the people that you were interacting with are just evil. The people you were interacting with do not have complicated lives that you should seek to understand."I think that's such a dangerous thing to put out there in the world, and especially to young people. So our Chris, I really relished the opportunity to say, "Yes, she does horrible things that we will not excuse, but she's a human being." And I think the tragedy of this is there are four or five times in that show where I see her on the brink of choosing to avoid that tragedy. And it's just that one little thing that tips it over because I do think, in life, it's never the big thing. It's the accumulation of all the little choices that put us where we are.Robert Falconer//Amazon PrimeMH: You’ve talked about your Carrie potentially having a three-season arc, but in the first season we cover the full story of the book, with some new seeds planted for the future. Could you tease a bit of what you have in mind from here? MF: All I have in mind right now are speculative wishes. Our whole mission was just to get to the end of this season and to render it as well as we possibly could. But I would never want to speculate about other books or things like that, because there's so much richness just in the Carrie White that we got to explore in this season. That character has so much more potential to see where she goes from here. We only got to see the tip of the iceberg of her place in this legacy of other gifted women, and I think that's where the focus would be. But I've worked in television long enough to know that I shouldn't think too much about that until it's time to.MH: Do you think working in television for as long as you have set you up to make the best version of this show? Do you think you could’ve taken Carrie on if it was five or 10 years ago?MF: I think you're absolutely right. Five or 10 years ago, I don't think I would've known how to approach it. A lot of how we got into this story, and how the adaptation came about, came out of lessons I started learning with Hill House, and I don't think I fully learned until we got through the Fall of the House of Usher. That was the first time I ever really felt like I knew what I was doing when it came to structural adaptation.Gareth Cattermole//Getty ImagesI know people love Hill House. A lot of people say that one's always going to be the best show. I see the hair on it, though. I see the plot points that don't really resolve or the characters who conveniently come in and out of the story. I see the conveniences of Hill House in a way a lot of the audience doesn't. And then when I look at The Fall of the House of Usher, that was the first time I was like, I think I figured it out. I think I know the process that I need to do here. And this was the first time I ever sat down at the start of a show with that feeling of I know what to do. But yeah, I don't know that I would've at all been able to see my way through the woods five years ago. I don't think so.MH: I follow you on Letterboxd, and know you went to a screening of the original Carrie movie after wrapping production, and said that some of the cast members had never seen it. How did that go? MF: Summer Howell had not seen it and had not read it. She had no exposure to Carrie, and a lot of our other younger actors hadn't either. And so when Summer was cast, she said, "Well, should I watch the De Palma movie?" I had to think about it, because at first I was like, "Of course you should. Go watch that, go read the book, and then let's talk about it and talk about what we're doing differently."I caught myself, and I was like, "I don't think you should. I think you should not watch it, actually. I think you should not let any of that into your head, because you're approaching this character from a place that is entirely your own without any influence from anything that came before it, and I think we need to protect that." So we did, and we would shoot scenes, and I would talk sometimes, "Oh, I don't want to do this because I don't want to get too close to the De Palma," or, "Oh, here's a chance where we could actually make a nice little loving reference to something De Palma did." And Summer would say, "I'm going to get to see that De Palma movie when we're done, right?" And I'm like, "Of course—we're going to do it right."They had a public screening at the Rio Theater in Vancouver, and we went, and we watched the movie right after we wrapped the show, and it was awesome. It was a wonderful night. God, that movie plays. What I loved was watching the shocked reactions from our cast when they saw how different that was, or how different some of those characters were from the ones they were playing. It started with the opening scene.I mean, just with the locker room scene, Summer looked over at me and was like … And I'm like, "I know, we did different. We did different." It was great, and it was really lovely to see them take it in and appreciate it for the cinematic achievement it is, but also just to be like, "Can you believe these choices that were made, how different ours was?" But then those moments where they were like, "Oh my God, I did almost the same thing and I had no idea." Those moments where it's like, "We made the same choice coincidentally." I loved seeing that.This interview has been edited for length and clarity.Watch Carrie HereEvan is the culture editor for Men's Health, with bylines in The New York Times, MTV News, Brooklyn Magazine, and VICE. He loves weird movies, watches too much TV, and listens to music more often than he doesn't.