King: A friend of mine, Kirby McCauley, was putting together an anthology called Dark Forces, and he wanted all these original stories from people who wrote in the field, in the genre. I said, "You know, Kirby, I don't think I can do that, because I'm blocked. I'm not writing anything." And I hadn't. I had finished like three books. There was Carrie, there was Salem's Lot, there was Night Shift, and I was kind of stuck, really.

I happened to be in the local market one time and a lot of people were shopping ... little town market, and I looked at the front windows and I thought, "You know, if something bad happened those windows would all blow in," because that's the way I think. It's not necessarily a good thing, but it's been a profitable thing over the years. And I thought about, mulled it over, and this story came out of it.

I've always been grateful to The Mist, because it kind of broke me out of a place where I couldn't seem to do anything, and this story just came very, very naturally. And in terms of Vietnam or any other conflict, if you're writing seriously, by which I mean trying as hard as you can, the issues that are in your mind, the things you've been through, are all going to play a part.The film feels like something of an attack on fundamentalism. Was fundamentalism at the fore back when you wrote this?

King: Well, Mrs. Carmody [the Harden character] was there back then, and Mrs. Carmody in Frank's movie is very much the Mrs. Carmody that was in the story. I don't want to go out and make political statements. I'm a storyteller, and Frank's a storyteller, and that's what we do. But I've said before, and I'll say again, that if you're trying to do your best work, these things are going to come up. They're going to become part of the story, and people are going to ask questions about it.

Is The Mist a political story? Is The Mist a story that has to do with the dangers of entrenched religion, fundamentalist religion? Is The Mist a story about red vs. blue? I'm not going to answer any of those questions. You go see the movies, and those questions will come up, and maybe you'll discuss them. If it serves as a springboard, that's great.What scares you?

King: I'm afraid of everything. It shows in my work. Elevators. Cars. One of the things ... the thing that started the new book was basically a combination of an accident that I had and a truck that was backing up, and the beeper was broken and somebody said, "Look out!" And a whole big long novel came out of that. But I'm with Frank on this, and that's one of the reasons why I love this movie, because it was a little bit like having somebody scratch a place on the middle of my back that I couldn't reach myself.

I mean, every night when I go to bed and nobody's popped a rogue nuke somewhere in the world, I feel this sort of combination of "I don't believe we escaped for another day," and gratitude because we did escape for another day. Because there's so much of that stuff out there. And I've written a lot of different things about that, from The Stand to The Mist, where you say a lot of people out there, they're afraid, they're angry, because fear and anger go hand in hand. They're the original-sin version of the Bobbsey Twins, you know, fear and anger.

And when they do there's always somebody to say, "Well, we had the answer, we had the only answer," because whatever the religion might happen to be, they're the ones who say, "We have the only answer, so let's get down on our knees and pray about it," and then on your way out there's guns in the vestry. Frank Darabont, is it true that Thomas Jane was the first actor cast?

Darabont: He was on board from an earlier point than most people. We had a good consensus about what the movie should be, and we had a great consensus about what his character should be. We never wanted the lead role to veer into the action-hero, movie-hero type thing. I wanted to keep—and Tom was on board with it—the character as dimensional and as real and as vulnerable as possible. I always knew he was more than capable of that, but he hadn't had a chance to show it all that much in his past roles. You've certainly seen good performances and certainly glimpses of that, but not quite the layered dimensional thing that's going on here. So we depended on each other to raise a red flag if we were running the risk of tipping into just the movie-hero type of thing.How involved was Stephen King in the production?

Darabont: Steve has been just lovely. He's been involved about to the degree he has been with the other films as well, which is to say he gives me the rights and I send him the script when it's done. Basically, his reaction usually is "Wow, great, make sure you invite me to the premiere." He remains supportive throughout the process, and I think he's particularly happy with this one. I think The Mist has been one of his favorites of his own for a lot of years, and he's really happy with [the film], which delights me no end. He's the first guy I want to please.You chose to rework the ending rather drastically. What went into that decision?

Darabont: That was the ending that always made sense to me. I always felt that the movie needed a definitive ending, and it really fell in line with my philosophy of "This is a horror movie, and it should send people out of the theater horrified and disturbed." I always knew that the ending was a risk. It's kind of a bold move, but I thought, "Well, why take half measures?" We have seen plenty of movies where they kind of wimp out, and I didn't want to do that. I wanted to try to make something that counted in the genre. It's the one ending that's always made sense to me.

When I say "wimp out," I don't necessarily mean in literature, but in a movie. I was always one of those people who hated The Birds, even when I was a kid, because there was no ending to the movie. I didn't much care for that. It's not a judgment on Steve's story as much as it on I just don't think it would work in a film. [King and I] had plenty of conversations about that. From the earliest days he said, "What are you going to do for the ending?" The nicest result of it was that, when he first read the screenplay, he paid me a great compliment. And I still have the email. He said, "Wow, I love the ending. If I'd thought of it, I'd have used it in the story."Is Fahrenheit 451 next for you? If so, what interests you about the story and remaking it?

Darabont: That is, fingers crossed, I would say 90 percent a go, but in the film business 90 percent ain't real until it's 100 percent. It's looking very positive for next year. I'm hoping that this whole [writers'] strike thing doesn't throw a wrench into our being able to plan it. So I'm hoping that the film doesn't jump off the track for that reason. I read the book when I was 9 years old, and even then I wanted to make a movie out of it. I remember seeing the Truffaut version and thinking, "Wow, that missed this book by several country miles." So it's not something that I feel has ever been put on film well. If it were a terrific movie, believe me, I wouldn't be bothering.Marcia Gay Harden, did you do research on fundamentalist Christianity?

Harden: Some. I bought The Idiot's Guide to Revelations [laughs]. So I could make all those words make sense. You know, the Four Horsemen and all that stuff. When you look at dialogue on a paper, as an actor, if it's "Bible-speak" it might as well be Shakespeare. And so the approach should be Shakespearean towards it. So you say "And so the Four Horsemen cometh, galloping across the mighty clouds, descending unto you and will take your very soul ..." Let's say I had that line. If I say that again [dramatically loud voice]: "And so the Four Horsemen cometh, galloping across the mighty clouds, descending unto you and will take your very soul!" ... It sounds so fake. But if I can say it like this [intense whisper]: "And so the Four Horsemen cometh, galloping across the mighty clouds, descending unto you and will take your very soul ..." and I look at you and try to make it real and make it personal and take it down, then I understand who she is, and what she's saying and what she's fighting against. It was a very real process of dissecting language and making it very specific.Were you and Darabont on the same page? Did he steer you to go over the top or to tone things down?

Harden: It's a rare occasion that I feel a director has little ego attached, and Frank has tremendous ego, in the best way, but only a little ego attached to my performance. He's helping me sculpt it, not control it. It was very collaborative.

I created five different looks initially. I had costumes, I had hair, we went to the bathroom from 10:30 a.m. to 2:30 in the morning because I was shooting this other film. And we created "the nun"—high white shirt, black jacket, hair pulled back. I created "Tammy Faye," beautiful little jacket, pretty skirt and knee short, with glasses. I created an "environmental hippie" who was pissed off, a woman who never had an opportunity to be a mother. And then the "preacher's daughter." He liked the nun, but I felt it was still a little too obvious. Like you would walk in and just know that something was odd. And also, I didn't think it would be sexual; it wouldn't be fun.

He was very supportive. There were moments where I thought I could've done more. But then there were other times where I felt like, had the camera been in a different place, it would feel different. I would tell the camera guys, "There's this great shot happening right now. As I'm talking about blood and death, there's a girl in the background sobbing." And I said, "How 'bout you come in on me on my line and then go out on her and then back on me?" Frank would be like, "That's great, I love it. Let me see it." And so we would do it. There was one particular take, one of the preaching scenes, I'm preaching and I'm done now with the lines and I expect the camera to stop, but it keeps rolling. The extras are all around me, and they're in it. And they also have a very religious background, and they were completely surrendering to the process of this, and they were there. One lady was stamping her feet, crying. Brother John, who was a Vietnam vet, who was in this coma for like a month after he fell down this mine shaft ... they're all, like, right there.

So Frank kept on rolling and I had to preach my own words for like four minutes. He kept that bloody camera rolling [laughs]. I had to come up with all kinds of things. The first minute, a fraction of a second, I'm halfway Marcia and halfway Carmody. And at first, the first second is embarrassing because I can't preach. "Where's the script?" But then the words just came out. It was really fun.

Laurie Holden, you did The Majestic with Frank Darabont. How did you enjoy reuniting with him on this?

Holden: It was wonderful. I had a great experience on The Majestic, so when he called me and said he had adapted Stephen King's novella and was going to film The Mist and offered me the part of Amanda, I was obviously thrilled.Beyond the opportunity to work again with Frank, what interested you about the part?

Holden: I loved that she was the conscience of the film. I love that she had so much faith in people and in humanity. I loved how nurturing and mothering she was, and that she was a leader in her own right.This is a very different film from The Majestic. Did you sense that Frank's approach was different, too?

Holden: It was night-and-day different. The Majestic was very elegant and Kubrick-esque filmmaking, and this was renegade, fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants, never-knew-where-the-cameras-were [filmmaking]. You had to be on all the time. It kind of felt like live theater in many ways. So it was night and day. Night and day.How much, if any, did your experience on Silent Hill help out on this one?

Holden: It was kind of different, to be honest. Pyramid Head was always there in Silent Hill, so we always had that as a reference point. And the knife was always there, frighteningly so, when Radha [Mitchell] and I were dodging it. But other than that there was no reference to anything. It was, "You see the darkness coming" [or] "You see this monster coming." And it was all our imagination. In The Mist, the special-effects guys came on set, showed us models. The animators showed us how every single creature moved, their teeth, their tails, their wings, what color they are, the hair on them, with such detail that it gave us such a wonderful point of reference when we had to look at an X on the window or a tennis ball on a stick. We all knew exactly what we were looking at, which I think was very helpful.Will you look at supermarkets any differently from now on?

Holden: Well, I'm on the Zone delivery, thank God. But I couldn't go into a supermarket for weeks after this, because I was so claustrophobic being in that store day after day. I mean, can you imagine being in a grocery store? ... You never want to be in one again. Twelve hours a day? It's just enough already. You start getting dizzy. And it really was like a real grocery store, because they had real food, really good food, to the point where they used to put memos out saying, "Actors, please stop eating the props," because we would, like, grab some chips or a candy bar. So we made it really hard on continuity. But it was really good, and it was better than craft service.