On working with Frank Darabont and his work process:

"I love to work with Frank. I’ve worked with Frank, well, basically, I don’t work with Frank, I just basically stand aside and let Frank do his thing, and the thing about Frank that I’ve always liked is that he still has a child’s imagination coupled with an adult’s ability to see the core of the material and then execute his vision. So you’ve got a couple of things going on there that hook up together that you don’t see in a lot of filmmakers. You do see it in some and they do good work. And Frank has always done good work. I feel very comfortable that I’m going to get something from Frank that’s going to be, usually, extraordinary. In my case, you know, he’s done The Woman in the Room, which was a small film, he’s done Shawshank, he’s done The Green Mile, and he’s done The Mist. And it isn’t just me. I hear from other people all the time; they’ll say I just loved those movies, you know. I ran in... I gotta tell this story.

"I ran into a woman... we live half the year down in Sarasota, and my wife and I have worked out an agreement where she’ll do the heavy shopping once a week, but she’ll send me for the crap, you know, that she forgets and stuff. So I’m there in the supermarket one day and I’ve got my, my little cart, and I come around the corner and there’s this woman... I’m going to say she was about ninety-five, and she said, 'I know who you are. You write those stories, those awful horror stories. I don’t respect that. I don’t like that. I like uplifting movies like that Shawshank Redemption.' And I said, 'I wrote that.' And she said, 'No you didn’t.' And that was it, she went on... 'No you didn’t.' Talk about going surreal. And I’m thinking to myself, 'Jeez, maybe I didn’t, you know,' for a minute. It’s not very much like my other stuff, maybe I didn’t write that one. But Frank does good work. In terms of the writing schedule, keyboards and all that, it doesn’t really matter to me if I’ve got access to writing materials. It doesn’t matter that much what the writing materials are. I have a regular schedule for writing that it’s in the morning, and I’ve done it enough years so that those things turn on. The real trick is it’s nice to have two or three ideas that are worth working on, then that’s something that you can’t always depend on having. Usually god’s been good to me, I’ve had a lot of interesting ideas. I’ve had a lot of fun."

How ideas come to him and what influences his ideas:

"Well, I’m... I’m a child of my - everything that I’ve read really since probably... the biggest influence on my life is going to be a movie in December, I am Legend by Richard Matheson, and Matheson - I mean I’ve read Poe and and all those guys, and I thought that they were good, but I didn’t have that kind of visceral connection where I thought, 'Oh yeah, this guy is doing it on my block, I like that.'"

Stephen King on his deepst fears:

"I’m afraid of everything. It shows in my work. Elevators, cars. One of the things - the thing that started the new book was basically a combination of an accident that I had and a truck that was backing up and the beeper was broken, and somebody said, 'Look out!' and a whole big long novel came out of that. But I’m with Frank on this and that’s one of the reasons why I love this movie was because, you know, it was a little bit like having somebody scratch a place on the middle of my back that I couldn't reach myself. I mean, every night when I go to bed and nobody popped a rogue nuke somewhere in the world, I feel this sort of combination of I don’t believe we escaped for another day, and gratitude because we did escape for another day, because there’s so much of that stuff out there. And I’ve written a lot of different things about that from The Stand to The Mist where you say a lot of people out there, they’re afraid, they’re angry because fear and anger go hand-in-hand. They’re the original sin version of the Bobsy Twins, you know, fear and anger. And when they do there’s always somebody to say, 'Well, we had the answer, we had the only answer because whatever the religion might happen to be, they’re the ones who say we have the only answer, so let’s get down on our knees and pray about it, and then on your way out there’s guns in the vestry.'"

King on the characters in The Mist:

"I try to put real people in stories. I would like to be able to do that, to put real people who are not clichés, who are not just you know, this deep. I’d like some texture in my stuff, you know. And Frank has always respected that, and this is a movie... you could categorize it as a horror movie. I never tell anybody what to do about that. Call it whatever you want to, but please, they’re real people in that supermarket, and you get a real sense of, of human people. And it’s not Friday the 13th Part 6. It’s got a more texture than that."

Stephen King Interview Page 3