Fun
Frisky
Nostalgic
Intense
Adventurous
Choked Up
Curious
Romantic
Weird
11/22/63 is Hulu’s ambitious adaptation of a thrilling Stephen King time travel novel about one modern man’s quest to save John F. Kennedy’s life. The mini-series united King with mega-producer and science fiction savant J.J. Abrams and Hollywood heavyweight James Franco. It would seem therefore that 11/22/63 is a pointedly masculine tale, but writer and producer Bridget Carpenter was the person responsible for weaving it all together behind-the-scenes.
The self-described Stephen King “purist” was hand-picked for the job by none other than Abrams himself to run the show. Abrams told a scrum of journalists at last month’s Winter TCA that his production company Bad Robot “had wanted to work with Bridget for a long time.” But how did Carpenter pull off the tight-rope act of balancing the distinctive storytelling tones of both Abrams and King? And did the irrepressibly creative James Franco add or subtract to the process? For Carpenter, it all went back to the source material.
“In the book, for me, it all felt of a piece. The book feels cohesive. It doesn’t feel like it lurches from sci-fi to horror to character [study],” said Carpenter. “The only thing we really didn’t want it to be silly or broad.
“I didn’t want to disappoint people who came wanting a little thrill or a little horror or, you know, kind of like a J.J. puzzle box, but at the same, I was like, This story is strong enough to withstand all of those genre parts. So, at the end of the day story really is everything, story and character so I let story and character dictate what the mood wants to be.”
While Carpenter was overseeing 11/22/63, Abrams was hard at work on the final cut of Star Wars: The Force Awakens. However, Carpenter says that the collaboration was surprisingly easy. She explained, “When you have someone who is as clear and as straightforward and as smart a communicator as J.J., he in fact makes it easy. I would say that I wanted the work to live up to the material and to live up to my collaborators. So I would say that he is an incredible collaborator as well, not only because of his incredible intellect and his vision, but because he empowered me. So when you have someone putting their faith in you then I think it makes it your best work and that’s how I felt. There’s no room for, you know, sleeping —”
She paused and laughed. “I was going to say ‘failure,’ but I’ll say ‘sleeping’ instead. There’s not time — you can’t just fall asleep at the wheel! You have to go, ‘Nope! We’re going to keep up, we’re going to do big things because I don’t want to bother ‘Dad’ because he’s doing Star Wars!”
Carpenter wasn’t the only person on set who had a vision for how to bring 11/22/63 to life, though. Star James Franco originally wanted the rights to the project to produce his own version of the King novel. This made for an atypical situation because an actor is usually brought on board a production to bring the showrunner or director’s vision to life.
“As an actor James is a really unique type of person, not only in his sort of charisma and just shear force of personality that he brings to it, but he is somebody who wants to try things, to try whatever you think to make the story work,” said Carpenter. “So he did bring himself and his ideas to the role — which I love! That’s what I look for in collaborations with actors — but he never refused anything, a direction that I or any other director wanted to go. So, he was like, ‘Yeah, let’s try that.’”
She added, “It is definitely a spirit of openness and exploration, on both our parts for sure.”
Carpenter’s favorite parts of the production were working with the pilot’s Academy Award-winning director Kevin McDonald and director of photography David Katznelson. Carpenter explained, “Anytime you can be around people who are, you know raising your game, visually, it feels great.” However, her favorite scene doesn’t come until the very end: the spellbinding finale.
“It was just such an enormous undertaking and yet it really wasn’t about the technical, it was about the emotional. And I love that combination, I’d love to work that way for the rest of my life, like trying to do something really big but in fact your focus is really on getting the really small, minuscule details right.”
11/22/63 is about to enter the pantheon of Stephen King film and TV adaptations, but which one does Carpenter like the most? After demurring that “nothing’s as good as his books,” she admitted to loving Misery. She laughed as she said, “Misery really is so terrible and terrifying and gruesome. Maybe I think that because it’s a writer at the center of it all!”
[Photos: Hulu]
