Digging Deeper Into the Pet Sematary

From It to the upcoming revival of Creepshow, Stephen King adaptations are popping up like zombie cats in a haunted graveyard.

The latest page-to-screen revision, Pet Sematary, sees directors Kevin Kölsch and Dennis Widmyer take on the story of the Creed family (Jason Clarke as father Louis, Amy Seimetz as mother Rachel, Jeté Laurence as 10-year-old Ellie, and Hugo and Lucas Lavoie as toddler Gage) as they find out that, sometimes, dead is better.

The pair are part of a rising tide of directing duos, like Miller and Lord, the Russo brothers (currently adding the finishing touches to Avengers: Endgame), and Captain Marvel's Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck, and their early collaborations, such as Starry Eyes, showed they were early to this game. We caught up with them after Pet Sematary world premiere at SXSW to discuss their working relationship, balancing old and new versions of the story, and that big change.

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Austin Chronicle: So going from smaller projects, where it's always all hands on deck, to a studio feature, what's the difference for you two as a directing duo, and how does that change you working relationship as co-directors?

Kevin Kölsch: The funny thing is that, when we first started, aside from the Coen brothers I didn't know of any other co-directors - and even the Coen brothers weren't talking a shared credit back then, so I didn't even know that they were even co-directing. Joel would go, "Oh, Ethan's my co-director," but I thought he was just going, "Oh, we write together, he's my brother." I didn't think he was really his co-director. So when we were doing it, I was like, "Is this even a thing? Is this allowed?"

We didn't go to the same film school, but started working together when we were still in film school. We worked on each other's solo projects, we'd act in each other's things, we'd watch movies together, liked the same movies, and were informing our tastes at the same time. Then we started writing screenplays together, and we're both aspiring directors, and it wasn't going to be one of these things where you have a writing team where one of them's not a director and you go, "You go direct something." It was our work, so naturally we started working together, and that's kind of all we know.

How has it changed? It hasn't necessarily. The project changes, but our process was really still the same. It wasn't like, when it's a bigger project we go, "OK, we need to change this up, and you take on this task, and I take on that task." We were still making the movie the same way we were an indie film. It's just some of the stuff around us changed.

Dennis Widmyer: We're still fighting the clock. There's never enough money. It's always the same things, but on a larger scale. And the deadline is way more extreme on something like this.

KK: There was a release date before we started shooting, so we were just hurtling forward. You're in the cutting room, you're trying different things, and you go, "Well, we better decide on one, because the movie's coming out."

DM: You never really finish a film. It just gets taken away.

AC: George Lucas said that you never finish a film, you just walk away.

DW: You have to put the pencil down, because you still look at the film and go, "That could be a little different," or "That could a few frames longer."

AC: This is a fresh adaptation - I'm very pointed when people say this is a remake, because it's not - but at the same time, you talked at the premiere about how you made this with the awareness that some people would know the 1989 version, and you could zig when they were expecting you to zag. At the same time, you make such major changes, like shifting the plot from Gage to Ellie. What's the process for making those changes, big and small?

KK: The book is there. We love the book. There's already been an adaptation that we love as well. We didn't want to do another adaptation like that one. We wanted to give people a new experience, we wanted to put our stamp on it, but at the same time you are adapting Pet Sematary.

So every change we made, we had a discussion: "Are we staying true to the essence, or is this going to be jumping the shark?" The small ones, we'd go, OK, that's fine, that playful. But even the big ones, we 'd go, "That's a major change, and it's a change that might surprise people, because they won't see it coming, but it's a change that keeps those themes in tact." There were some big changes that were in the script when we read it that we took out, because we didn't feel it was true enough to the book, or that we felt were deviating too much.

AC: Keeping the spirit is the vital part of any adaptation. Take L.A. Confidential: It's nothing like the warp and the weft of the book, but it's absolutely L.A. Confidential.

DW: The serial killer angle in the middle of the book. And the train escape, with all the convicts? That's a giant set piece that's not in the movie.

AC: But the big change here is shifting from Gage to Ellie, and that does involve somewhat of a textual change. Because Gage is so young, he's non-verbal, and it leaves this void where the audience doesn't know what happened to him, and he can never tell them. Whereas Ellie, being old enough to be verbal, and she shows some intelligence, that's such a major shift. When you were faced with the script, and it's got this major change in how the evil presents itself - not just through action, but verbal manipulation - how did you respond? Because that seven year age difference is all the difference in the world.

KK: That was the reason for the change. It wasn't just to shift it so people didn't know what to expect - although that is fun to do - but the reason was to have the character that, at the beginning of the movie, is asking, "What happens when we die, and what happened to my pet?" Then to have them be present at the end of the movie, and ask those same questions and know that something's happened to them, and going, "Hey, I'm dead, aren't I?"

In the book, Ellie has all those conversations at the beginning of the book, but she's not even present at the climax. She's in Chicago. So it was just taking the character who asked all those questions and making her the own there. She's verbal, she can ask those questions, and it can explore these themes on a psychological level that a three-year-old couldn't.

AC: All that makes it more essential that you have the right Ellie. What was the point that you know Jeté Laurence was her?

DW: Well she came in a few times, and she had the chops, and was a good actress, but then we did something smart. We brought Jason Clarke to sit down with the best actresses that came in. He put her through the ringer. He didn't pander to her. He didn't go, "Oh, she's a kid actress, I'll go soft on her." He did his performance, and she had to stay with him, and rise to the challenge. She was not intimidated, and we saw, wow, she can match Jason's intensity. She's prepared for the kind of movie that we're trying to make.

When you're casting a movie like this - we had this with Alex (Essoe) in Starry Eyes - you want allies in your cast. You want them not only to be good actors, but you want them to understand the kind of movie that you're trying to make. They are helping you try to achieve the same goal. They're not fighting it, they're enhancing. So when you're dealing with a 10-year-old actress, a: she's young but b: she has to understand that the movie asks her to do a lot of dark things. So you don't just need the talent, you need the wherewithal of the person behind that performance, understanding the movie that they're trying to make, so they know why we're going there and what we're asking of them.

We knew it would be easy to find someone who was cute and lovable and able to go there. But to then find that same person for the second half of the movie, and bring that evil, that was the part we were worried about, and that was the part a lot of actresses couldn't do. They were these young commercial actresses who know how to tap dance, but they didn't know how to say these horrible things and get under your skin and unnerve you. Jeté was the best at this - thank god. It really rests on that, and if we didn't get that, we would have been screwed.

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Pet Sematary is in cinemas now. For review and listings, visit our showtimes page.