“I’m Mike Flanagan. I’m the screenwriter, the director, the editor, and one of many producers for “The Lifetime of Chuck.” So we’re seeing Chiwetel Ejiofor, who performs Marty Anderson. He’s strolling proper now to his ex-wife’s home in the course of the top of the world. At this level within the story, and this scene is taken just about immediately from Stephen King’s unique novella, the world is nearly over. Nobody understands why, and he’s on foot along with his telephone, not working with automobiles backed up, making visitors not possible, and he’s looking for his solution to his ex-wife. “Hey.” He encounters this younger lady who’s curler skating, who’s performed by Violet McGraw, who I labored with on “The Haunting of Hill Home” and on “Physician Sleep.” And what I discovered actually placing about this scene when Stephen King wrote it, is that it’s a really sort of informal dialog of two individuals who simply occur to cross one another throughout this apocalyptic time, and the way they join. He was a trainer earlier than the world fell aside. And so he’s referring to her the best way we think about he may have associated to his college students again within the day. Within the novella, this can be a very stunning scene as a result of in the course of all of this, all the energy on the earth sort of goes out directly. So we took over this intersection on this neighborhood close to Cellular, Alabama, the place we needed to create this impact that you simply’re about to see, which is the place we took over the ability grid and principally blacked out the complete world there. There’s a serious change within the story right here, as a result of the presence of the title character, Chuck Krantz, has been restricted up till this level to billboard appearances and commercials. It’s not been supernatural, however within the story, that is the place his presence turns into one thing way more ethereal, one thing that clearly isn’t terrestrial and is one in every of our final hints into what’s actually happening right here. Within the guide, it’s described as this ectoplasmic projection of the billboard photographs that begin showing. We achieved this the very quaint method, by hanging televisions within the home windows on their sides and pre-recording these movies and operating round, hitting play on every of them with a view to get the picture to look within the window. However all of that was actually seen on set. It’s a type of issues that in apply is definitely sort of ridiculous, however appears to be like very uncanny on display screen. “Go house. Go house to your mother and pop.” And at this level, the characters understand that what’s happening isn’t one thing that they’ll clarify, and that Chuck’s identification goes to be way more vital. I believe there’s a way of loneliness right here on the finish of the world. We deliberately made certain there have been no extras. There have been no automobiles seen. And Marty, for the primary time, begins to really feel the panic of the state of affairs as a substitute of the acceptance of it.
