‘The Life of Chuck’ | Anatomy of a Scene

“I’m Mike Flanagan. I am the screenwriter, the director, the editor, and one of the producers for “The Life of Chuck.” So we’re seeing Chiwetel Ejiofor, who plays Marty Anderson. He’s walking right now to his ex-wife’s house in the middle of the end of the world. At this point in the story, and this scene is taken pretty much directly from Stephen King’s original novella, the world is almost over. No one understands why, and he’s on foot with his phone, no longer working with cars backed up, making traffic impossible, and he’s trying to find his way to his ex-wife. “Hey.” He encounters this young woman who’s roller skating, who’s played by Violet McGraw, who I worked with on “The Haunting of Hill House” and on “Doctor Sleep.” And what I found really striking about this scene when Stephen King wrote it, is that it’s a very kind of casual conversation of two people who just happen to cross each other during this apocalyptic time, and how they connect. He was a teacher before the world fell apart. And so he’s relating to her the way we imagine he could have related to his students back in the day. In the novella, this is a very shocking scene because in the middle of all of this, all of the power in the world kind of goes out at once. So we took over this intersection in this neighborhood near Mobile, Alabama, where we had to create this effect that you’re about to see, which is where we took over the power grid and basically blacked out the entire world there. There’s a major change in the story here, because the presence of the title character, Chuck Krantz, has been limited up until this point to billboard appearances and commercials. It’s not been supernatural, but in the story, this is where his presence becomes something much more ethereal, something that clearly isn’t terrestrial and is one of our last hints into what’s really going on here. In the book, it’s described as this ectoplasmic projection of the billboard images that start appearing. We accomplished this the very old fashioned way, by hanging televisions in the windows on their sides and pre-recording these videos and running around, hitting play on each of them in order to get the image to appear in the window. But all of that was really visible on set. It’s one of those things that in practice is actually kind of ridiculous, but looks very uncanny on screen. “Go home. Go home to your mom and dad.” And at this point, the characters realize that what’s going on isn’t something that they can explain, and that Chuck’s identity is going to be much more important. I think there’s a sense of loneliness here at the end of the world. We intentionally made sure there were no extras. There were no cars visible. And Marty, for the first time, starts to feel the panic of the situation instead of the acceptance of it.