Despite working on it for over a year, Jonathan Demme has decided that, no, he doesn’t want to make Stephen King‘s JFK/time-travel novel 11/22/63 into a movie after all, citing creative differences as the reason for his departure from a project he once loved so dearly. “I loved certain parts of the book for the film more than Stephen did,” the Silence of the Lambs director said. “We’re friends, and I had a lot of fun working on the script, but we were too apart on what we felt should be in and what should be out of the script.”
The book tells the story of Jake Epping, a teacher who discovers a wormhole in the back door of a diner that somehow connects him to 1958 and sets him on a journey trying to prevent the Kennedy assassination (see, the name of the book is a date for a reason!). There’s all sorts of investigation stuff going on as a result, albeit amongst a whole bunch of “Oh, isn’t it nice here in the past?” type moments, because if literature has taught us anything, it’s that a different era is always better than your own.
At a huge 900 pages, this is one of King’s longest novels (and one of his best, actually), meaning that a film adaptation would require a whole lot of cutting and editing down – presumably the point at which the disagreements between Demme and King started. Still, now that Jonathan Demme has left this particular project, there are just a measly 999,999,999 Stephen King movie adaptations in the works, which is a whole lot less than we’d imagined. And just so you know, it’s not a government conspiracy or anything like that that’s stopping people from making this movie. Which is what we’d say if there was, I suppose. But there’s not. Definitely not a conspiracy. Stop looking at us like that.
Source: IndieWire