Prolific director and producer Jack Bender became a friend of bestselling author Stephen King after they revealed they were a fan of each other’s work. Bender is now one of the executive producers of the adaptations of both King’s Bill Hodges trilogy – Mr Mercedes, Finders Keepers and End of Watch – and his latest novel, The Outsider. Mr Mercedes arrived on Starzplay in the UK earlier this summer, and with the second season just beginning, Bender took some time to chat with Paul Simpson about his time in “Stephen King-dom”.

How did Mr Mercedes come about?

Stephen [King] and I were looking for something new to do together; he became a fan of mine on Lost and then we worked together on the first two seasons of Under the Dome. I admire the maestro hugely and luckily enough he’s become a friend.

One day in the mail I got this very thick package – the galleys for Stephen King’s new book, Mr Mercedes. I sat my ass down straightaway and I read it. I loved it for a couple of reasons – apart from the characters and the writing and all that Stephen usually does. I thought, this is the first thing I’ve read of Stephen King’s that really tackles the detective genre head on – he’s got the classic detective architecture of the retired cop and the one that got away, the case that he’s never solved that comes back into his life and coincidentally brings this disenfranchised train wreck of a man back to the land of the living. I also thought that this is Stephen King writing about the monster inside the people, instead of the monster outside the people.

I told Stephen I loved it and wanted to do it – I thought of it as a movie originally – and then got involved with my executive producer, Marty Bowen. We started kicking around the idea of doing it as a stretched out longer story that would really do justice to it in eight to ten episodes, which you can now do brilliantly on television. I thought that would give us the time to spend with these characters and do justice to them.

I called Stephen, and I said, “You know who has to play Hodges?” He said, “Who?” I said, “I don’t know if you know him, but did you ever see In Bruges, the actor Brendon Gleason?” He says, “Oh my God, Brendon Gleason is one of the most brilliant actors.”

We were initially told by his people that “he’s never done a series, he probably won’t do it”, but one thing led to the next. He loved David Kelley’s pilot for the show and we fortunately got Brendan Gleason to play Hodges, and the excellent Harry Treadaway and the exceptional cast. I believe the success of this show rests largely on these performances and these characters.

What was the biggest challenge for you of bringing the Bill Hodges trilogy to the screen?

The challenge for me directorially was starting with the massacre. When Stephen King wrote this book originally, he read an article around 2009 in the newspaper about somebody who drove into people at a job fair and killed 50 people. That story didn’t make the national news in print; it wasn’t publicised on television. It was so not in the zeitgeist at the time.

Then tragically the world continued to get more screwed up, and the terrorists decided this was an easy way to kill people. As you know from living in the UK, that it very much became the weapon of choice. As we got closer to making the show, [the massacre in] Nice had just happened so I felt a real obligation to show [the massacre at the start, where Brady kills multiple people] in an honest way, and not cinematically exploit it, not put a frame around it with action music, and great slow motion Sam Peckinpah shots of bodies flying through the air, all that stuff. I didn’t want to exaggerate the reality. I wanted to put the audience there, and God forbid, this might be what it felt like.

That very much became the marching orders for the show. I felt [we should have] no music, no score, but I came up with the idea, that David Kelley loved, of having Hodges be a prize vinyl collector. I had a friend after college, who would do like brain surgery on records before he put them on – he had all this expensive stereo equipment. I had a record player, and threw my records around and just put them on. He was horrified.

I decided that one of the only things about Hodges in his present train wreck state of life is he takes really good care of his records, and his tortoise that he bought his daughter when she was very young. (The tortoise came from the fact we have about a 29 year old tortoise that lives in our front yard, that David Kelley was obsessed with – he lives in a dog house with a heat lamp. His name is Fred also, and I bought him for my younger daughter Hannah… that’s a whole different story!)

I only wanted to use that music, those needle drops – what Hodges listens to and what Brady listens to. With all those characters caught up in the middle, this show was very much the story about these two seriously flawed and yet opposite characters, and their hatred for each other, and in a sick way, their love for each other – or their need for each other. Musically, I said “Let’s just use those songs”, and it worked brilliantly; people loved that.

I also wanted to keep the show visually really honest and not at all, “Look at me, the director, and all these cool shots that I’m doing.” The few directors who came to our show in seasons 1 and 2 – I did 8 out of 10 both times – I would say, “Any time it’s about you and your shot it’s going to be wrong.” There’s a fine line between [that and] just recording directorially – “let’s shoot the scene, record the scene and let the actors do it”. You’ve got to find a way to enhance the scene, bring it to life and visualise it; but at the same time you don’t want to overdo anything that distracts from focusing on the characters and what they’re going through, and giving them time to do it.

Basically, that was my challenge, and it continued to be that in season 2, even though this book goes off into slightly more what I call Stephen King-dom.

The second book has hints of weirdnesses; End of Watch definitely goes that way – and The Outsider takes it even further.

When Stephen sent me The Outsider he said, “I couldn’t let go of one of our characters – tell me what you think.” I realised that Holly served that story simply as somebody who’s thinking out of the box. It does go further than the others – it’s one of the reasons I love The Outsider because it goes head on into that horrific monster. Mr Mercedes walked the fine line. I liked the idea that The Outsider was that scary and that creepy, and he had created another monster that could make you look under your bed before you go to sleep – which is what he’s a master of.

From the trailers and what was said at Comic-Con, it seems the second season is dealing with the plot of End of Watch; are elements of Finders Keepers going to be in the season, or are you moving pretty much into the third book?

Finders Keepers is an exceptionally entertaining brilliant book – and I love the aspect of having it reverberate on somebody who was damaged at the job fair, because in some ways that’s the responsibility on us as storytellers to show the ripples in the pond from one heinous catastrophic event, [show] how many lives have been destroyed and touched because of it. We may deal with that in season 3, David and I have talked about it.

But the challenge with Finders Keepers was our heroes didn’t turn up for 250 pages and Dennis Lehane, one of our head writers this year, and the writers had to come up with a way to keep the story going, to find a way to have Brady be an active part of the season, and not just laying in the hospital bed, narrating, which we didn’t want.

I think the writers and we came up with an exceptional way to do this season and to explore and push the envelope. That was tricky all along because I never wanted this show to dip over into Carrie or any other brilliant project of Stephen’s. I wanted it to remain first and foremost a character based show. Hodges provides us with a perfect Everyman to go “What the fuck are you talking about?” Then when the evidence piles up, which is definitely a formula in The Outsider also, then it’s “Wait a minute, there’s more of it going on here folks than any of us know about.”

I’m very naïve, I tend to believe in everything, and I do believe we are antennas and if TV signals can go through the air, then God knows, maybe some of the people going down the street in rags talking to people you don’t see can receive certain things that some of us can’t. All of us as thinking people will acknowledge the fact that very few of us know the potential of the human brain.

It’s the same kind of thing as I don’t think there’s any thinking person in the world who says there’s not life out there when you look up at the sky. I remember as a little kid in the 1960s, there were a lot of people who said there were no Martians, no people on other planets, but when you’re confronted with just small we are, and how big and fast and unthinkably huge that is, nobody in their right minds will say there’s no other civilisation, no other life out there.

Similarly I think any thinking person would say very few, if any of us, understand the potential of the brain. In this season of Mr Mercedes we do explore that with Dr Babineau and his wife. We have some excellent new cast members this season and in the case of Jack Huston and Tessa Ferrer [as Dr Felix Babineau and his wife Cora], they do make a good job of making these characters credible not just evil.

Off the early episodes, there’s a bit of a Lady Macbeth vibe to Cora…

That was in the writing, and in the initial scripts it was too heavy handed. Plotwise you do get that feeling but I often said “We don’t want them wearing a mustachio and twirling it.” We wanted to get away from the obvious Lady Macbeth.

God knows when Cora gets on her husband and says, ‘I want you to fuck me,’ (I’m quoting the show now) ‘tonight when I’m pregnant because I may not be tomorrow’, you go, “That’s somebody I don’t to be married to, as attractive as she may be.”

As the story progresses, you really start to see the human beings who are trapped in this story and serving it in a certain way, and really understand their motives. That was a trap the actors and I felt we had to avoid because it was written a bit that way.

You’ve mentioned season 3 – do you think this has the potential to run for some time to come?

I know there’s going to be a season 3, it’s not official but I know there’s going to be one and we’re already talking about what it’s going to be. Anything can go long – Lost was the first massive hit where the creators, we all said, we’re done after 6 years. ABC in their defence had this massive corporation called Lost and they said OK, because the writers said, “We cannot keep writing endlessly. We have to write for a finish.” It’s true that a lot of fans were pissed off at the ending that was written, even though I was very proud of it – it was how we lived our lives, etc. not a big CIA plot – but ABC gave us the go that we could end it.

You don’t want these shows to go on forever but there’s definitely going to be a season 3. In the worlds of storytelling and television, you can always fabricate a third, and I don’t know what we’re going to do with that yet, and you can always fabricate a fourth – but I’m not planning on that at this point.

 

Mr Mercedes is now playing on Starzplay, available via Prime Video Channels.

Thanks to Sam Ross, Danielle Kemble and Gabriella Syer-Willoughby for their help in arranging this interview.