Mike Flanagan Talks the Importance of Monologue, Helming the ‘The Exorcist’ Remake, and More | ATX TV Festival

Aside from the typical situations that make people remember a TV series vividly, like a big-name character’s death, a joke going viral, or your favorite celebrity joining your favorite series, an outstanding monologue will keep viewers coming back over and over.

Mike Flanagan, the mastermind behind Midnight Mass, The Fall of the House of Usher, and The Haunting of Hill House, recently attended the ATX TV Festival in Austin, Texas, for a panel titled “The Monologue Case Study with Mike Flanagan.”

During the panel, Flanagan discussed the journey of his monologues from inception to the screen.

“I will say I never set out to write a monologue,” Flanagan said. “That never happens. I’m never like, now, time for the monologue. I usually realize it’s happening at a certain point. There’s just a lot of words, and I’ll kind of be like, ‘Ah, yes, it’s happening again.’ And it’s something that I’ve become aware of because I love a good monologue.”

“By the time I hit the bottom of the page, it’s just like, ‘Yep, I’ve got more to say.’ And then if I start imagining if it’s written for a particular actor, and I’m like, ‘Oh, Kate’s gonna kill this,’ or the lemon monologue. When that started, it was meant to be a two-line joke.”

Monologues in Midnight Mass

“With Midnight Mass, there were monologues because I had a lot to say. With the lemon thing, it was a joke, and it just kept happening. I just kept writing, and I just became giddy about the idea of any actor performing it,” Flanagan continued.

Flanagan recalled a moment from his childhood when he first saw Quint’s monologue about Indianapolis from Jaws. It knocked him out then and still does to this day.

“I think it’s an art form that is increasingly rare in movies and television, but theater has held onto it admirably,” Flanagan said.

“But I think as our attention spans keep being assaulted, and people get used to shorter and shorter bursts of content, which I just hate — you know, my kids, I have three kids, and they prefer watching YouTube to watching movies or television because it’s shorter. And if I put on a movie for them, they’ll say it’s too long. It breaks my heart.”

In a world that thrives on thrill, gore, and action, more and more filmmakers have to fight to include the necessary monologues needed for the story. Having to put his foot down, Flanagan was forced to fight to include a lot within Midnight Mass.

“The monologues in Midnight Mass were very personal and on the razor’s edge, for me, the difference between storytelling and confession. And especially by the end of it, I put myself in a scenario where I was meant to try to summarize what I feel and believe about life after death in a single monologue. I agonized over that for a very long time,” Flanagan expressed.

Midnight Mass is a project that Flanagan started writing 11 years before filming began. He said that moment in the show was part of the initial draft and always intended to be in the final cut.

Over the decade, though, it changed drastically due to him changing so radically as a person. It was one of the more difficult scenes for him to perfect throughout the series.

“You’ll see we’re cutting all over the place. We’re all over the island. We’re checking into other characters. The music is kind of incredible. And that one, even in post, I was tinkering with. I was moving words around. I was changing the order of some of the ideas as they were presented. I never quite stopped tinkering with it.”

The Haunting of Hill House

Victoria Pedretti’s ending monologue, deemed the confetti monologue, featured in The Haunting of Hill House Season 1 Episode 10, “Silence Lay Steadily,” is one of the more bone-chilling, time-stopping moments in all of the series he’s helped create.

It’s also one of the most demanding shoots he’s endured.

“Victoria’s a phenomenal actor — phenomenal — and had already made this character, someone that I completely fell in love with as a writer. I knew Victoria was going to do an amazing job with it. There was no doubt in my mind.”

“The shoot remains one of the most difficult things that I ever lived through. I lost almost 40 pounds shooting the show. I did not enjoy it. It was it was a brutal birth for The Haunting of Hill House. By the time we were shooting this, the entire cast was beyond exhausted and spent. If someone says, ‘Hey, you should direct ten episodes of television yourself.’ Say no, that’s too much,” he continued.

Talking about that day on set, he said he “remember[s] that day being in that really depressing set covered in fake mold, watching her do that, and crying at the monitor.

“A big difference between this and the lemons is looking at how much we’re cutting and how much we’re zipping around. There’s a lot of visual, editorial storytelling happening in that sequence, but it still very much feels like Victoria has you in the palm of her hand because she does.”

On when to cut a monologue altogether

He also recalled a time when he mistakenly thought he needed a monologue in one series. However, in the editing process, he found a better direction.

“The actor did exactly what I wanted. It’s exactly how I heard it. I looked at it for seven minutes, and the movie lived with it for weeks. I was sitting in the cutting room, and I just had this feeling that the scene would land much better if no one said a word. I recut it so that it was just three reaction shots of the character sitting in silence that I took from between chunks of the model, and it’s so much better.”

“I had to call the actor and say, ‘I’m sorry, you did it right. I messed up. I wrote a scene that said out loud a bunch of stuff that I shouldn’t have said out loud because it was all there, and it was all there without words,'” Flanagan said.

“If you can tell the story silently, that’s pure, and that’s cinema. That’s the goal, and sometimes you have to write eight pages of monologue to get there, but in this case, I very clearly say to this wonderful actor, ‘I failed you in this. I overwrote this. I thought I needed to do it.'”

Remaking The Exorcist

It was recently announced that Flanagan will be helming the remaking of The Exorcist, and when pitching to Blumhouse and Universal, he expressed his understanding that the film is not a monologue-centric project.

“The ritual itself is something of a monologue, but we’ve seen that. They were concerned, and I understand why. They said, ‘Well, it’s just, this is big. It’s theatrical. So it just isn’t really where you want to be doing long monologues about religion and faith.'”

“This should be really scary, and that means the character work is still on me to make them real, relatable, and emotionally relevant. But this isn’t the project or where we should be monologuing. I said I completely agree with you, and if it makes you feel any better, I made that show. I already got it out of my system,” Flanagan laughed.

Another upcoming project: The Life of Chuck

During the hour-long panel conversation, he also revealed that he recently filmed a movie called The Life of Chuck, based on a short story by Stephen King. It features a stellar star-studded cast, and Mark Hamill delivers one of his favorite pieces of acting Flanagan has ever seen.

“It was really fun for me to do something outside of the horror genre that just made me feel good about being alive,” Flanagan said.

“I don’t know when it will be out because we made it completely independently, and we do not have a distributor. We’ll likely premiere the movie at a film festival later this year and try to sell it then. I can tell you it’s got Tom Hiddleston, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Karen Gillan, and Mark Hamill. It’s my favorite movie.”

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