Familiarity with Stephen King’s Work: Director Hafstrom says he's been a fan of King’s writing for decades. “I think my first encounter with Stephen King film-wise was watching Brian De Palma's Carrie back in the day,” said Hafstrom. “I think Carrie was one of the first films that was made of Stephen King. This was in the mid-‘70s, 1976 I think Carrie came out. I got really obsessed by that film and I liked it a lot. I started to watch Brian De Palma films but I also started to read a little bit of King's work.
I have read some, I haven't read everything. I think King's genius is in short stories, which is a very tough literary genre to pull off. But I think he's a great master in this contained way. 1408 — it's what? 40 pages long or something, but if you read it right, you get a lot of the information there. And, obviously, our film is longer. Our film had more material than is in the short story, but I feel very much that we are very true to the heart and soul of the short story. I feel like Enslin's character is the guy that Stephen King writes about in the short story, even if we trade a more ambitious backstory and so on. So it started with Carrie and I haven't read everything. I think that nobody has read everything Stephen King wrote, because it's so much. But I read a lot of his short stories. I think they are great.”
Samuel L Jackson on the Supernatural: Jackson’s a believer and doesn’t mind admitting it. “I grew up in Tennessee around people who believe all kinds of things,” explained Jackson. “I was told ghost stories at night by my grandfather and his brothers. One lady in my neighborhood, because I grew up in the segregated South so sometimes when we got hurt or sick or whatever, we couldn't afford to go to the doctor or even go to the hospital because we figured they weren't going to see us anyway, so they called what was known in our neighborhood as the 'root lady' who would actually come over. She'd put very stinky stuff on you and chant, good stuff. And you would get well. She would take herbs and things and we bought chickens… We didn't buy chickens from the store, we bought chickens off a truck. They were live chickens and we killed them. She got the heads and feet. She did stuff with them.
There were people who died in our neighborhood that we saw long after they were dead. If you were out at night and looking around the wrong place, doing something wrong and you'd look up and there would be that lady who used to call your house and tell your mother you were doing something wrong. You'd be like, ‘She's dead. She's not supposed to be here and she is.’ And you weren't the only person that saw her. It was kind of like we had phenomenon like that, that went on throughout my life. We've gone through interesting things.”
Jackson continued, “People would tell you stories about places you could go. There was a school bus that turned over in this particular place and if you go there at a certain time of night, you can hear the kids crying and hear the screeches of the tires. And we'd go there and, sure enough, you’d hear it. So there are lots of things that we can't explain that somebody somewhere has seen these things and they write about them. Some people remember them vividly enough to write about them. Some people make them up. But there are lots and lots of things that we can't explain that are just part of our culture.”
The Rumors of Eli Roth’s Involvement: Producer Lorenzo di Bonaventura acknowledges that at one point Cabin Fever / Hostel 1 and II director Eli Roth was attached to 1408. Had Roth remained involved, the finished film would have been much, much different. “Eli was attracted to it right away,” said di Bonaventura. “Eli’s take we could not set up anywhere and so he fell out. It was a little while later that Dimension bought the rights to the short story and [writer Matt] Greenberg came in. Scott [Alexander] and Larry [Karaszewski] followed, and then Mikael.”
Asked about Roth’s take on 1408, di Bonaventura replied, “It’s too bloody to say it out loud. It was madness, an entirely different movie actually. He has such a love of the most bloody parts of the genre that I think it scared everybody at the time. To go through some kind of transition like that, what’s very fortunate about it is some of the most interesting aspects of the story - which is mental disintegration as opposed to any sort of physical degradation going on - we thought that Mikael and John the writers could bring it to the table on that.”
Making 1408 a More Traditional Scary Movie Than Recent Films of the Genre: “I hesitate to put any genre into any sort of a box, and I think what this movie does versus what Eli has done in those movies is two totally different experiences,” said di Bonaventura. “I hope that the genre is big enough to do all of that. You always want the fans to show up on opening weekend, but this movie is trying to go beyond a call to the extreme, to elicit a reaction. It’s going towards the subtle or the nuance or the emotional, and we need the audience to come and support us in doing that. That’s the only way we’re going to decide how wide and how broad the genre is, if the audience keeps showing up. That’s going to be our challenge.”
The Process of Choosing Roles: Jackson explained what he looks for in a film. “I know what I want to see if I’m an audience member, so I read scripts as an audience member, number one. I always see a script and say, ‘Do I want to see this?’ Or number one, ‘Would I pay my money to go see this?’ Then, ‘Would I pay my money to see it with me in it?’ And if the answer is yes, then I do it."
