According to Bev Vincent’s Stephen King: A Complete Exploration Of His Work, Life, And Influences, the author was traveling between Florida and Maine when he heard a news story about a woman who, during an “altercation” with another woman, ended up driving her car into a crowd of people.Īfter mulling over this story for about a year, King imagined the crime being far worse and pondered the idea of the driver getting away with it, his identity kept a secret. It’s not a whodunit, it’s this game of wits with life and death stakes we get to see from both sides.Īs for the crime that would be at the center of his story, Stephen King took inspiration from real life and turned the dial up to 11 on the horribleness. The way I handled it was to go back to Hitchcock, where you really know everything and the characters don’t know anything. I’ve read detective novels my whole life and I say that without a shred of guilt, starting with Agatha Christie when I was 12 years old. Mercedes he wanted to tackle material akin to the Master of Suspense himself, Alfred Hitchcock. In the same interview he explained how he has devoured mysteries since he was young, and with Mr. Are you going to do this, or punk out and be gutless?’įurther encouraging him to pursue the story was a passion for the storytelling.

You’re doing OK financially - it isn’t like you need to write a certain kind of story in order to feed your family. I had this discussion with myself: ‘Wait a minute, you’re in your 60s now. He determined that there was a degree of cowardice involved: In a 2017 interview with USA Today (opens in new tab), King explained that he had a moment of getting real with himself and analyzing what it was that was stopping him from getting the work done. Access to the show wasn’t exactly broad, as the network on which it aired was only available to DirecTV and AT&T U-verse subscribers, but between the 10 hours of runtime real estate and zero limitations in regards to language, sexuality and violence, a perfect opportunity was available to create an ideal adaptation. Kelley and Jack Bender respectively attached to write and direct, but one did by the time Audience announced a 10-episode order, and both were out by the time principal photography commenced in early 2017. Mercedes TV series was first announced in January 2015 with David E. The sequels admittedly didn’t exist in publication when the Mr. For the first time in the history of Stephen King adaptations, an on-going television series was developed with the plan to have a single season adapt a single novel – which was a plan that was executable because King had written a pair of sequels that could be adapted subsequently and keep the show going. Mercedes is special compared to all that came before it. The work generally demands a certain amount of compromise and manipulation… but Mr.

Stephen king mercedes