Rebecca Ferguson as Rose the Hat in Doctor Sleep 

hello mike!

i don’t know if you already answered this, or if there even is an exact answer to my question. but why does rose wear a hat? i’ve always wondered exactly why she wears it

I'd love to hit you back with some wild cerebral metaphorical jazz hands, but she wears the hat because she just really likes it. A lot.

hey mike, i was wondering what some of your favourite props are that you have in your "nerd room"

I've got a pretty sizable collection of props at this point, though I'm a little wary about putting them up on the internet. But of course some of my favorite things are pieces from my own productions over the years. I wasn't smart enough to keep things for most of my career, and I've actually spent a fair amount of time clawing some of those things back and buying or trading from private collectors.

Here are some of the pieces I am comfortable showing, and I hope they bring you joy!

Doctor Sleep (2019)

Hi Mike!

Not sure if you've discussed this before: when you were making Doctor Sleep, was it difficult recreating scenes from the original Shining movie? In terms of sets, casting etc - because I thought it was crazy impressive how well everyone involved pulled it off and the attention to detail it must have required!

Keep up the awesome work!! (please) and have a great day :D

Hi there, I did put up a long post about DOCTOR SLEEP a while back. Here you go!

Mike Flanagan shares a photo of himself and Alex Essoe on the set of Doctor Sleep. In the photo, he is poking his head through the bathroom door while Alex, as Wendy Torrance, screams with a knife in her hand. The caption reads, "Heeeeeerrreee's a throwback #DoctorSleep"

Is there any one thing that you've written/directed that scares you more than anything else you've created? Or perhaps something you've created that you thought was so scary it shouldn't be made public and you cut it?

The scene that scared me the most in my career was the baseball boy sequence of DOCTOR SLEEP. I knew the story needed the scene, it was an essential moment, and I was following the blueprint that Stephen King had laid out in the novel, but still... I'd thought we could sidestep a lot of the trauma by filming around the actual violence. I figured keeping all of it off screen and only focusing on a closeup of Jacob's face would help soften the impact, but Jacob delivered such a realistic and heartbreaking performance that the scene felt even more brutal than I'd thought it would be. (I always try to mention here - Jacob was absolutely fine. He had prepared the performance with his father in the weeks leading up to the shoot, and he hopped up off the ground after the first take with a big grin on his face. He knew he'd leveled all of us, he high-fived his dad and sauntered over to the craft service table while we stood there speechless and with tears in our eyes.) That scene affected all of us very deeply, and it remains the scariest thing I've ever filmed. I cut it back several times in the edit, and even that didn't do anything to dull the impact. When I showed the film to Stephen King, he said "I love the movie... but that baseball boy scene is a bit much though" and I didn't know what to say besides "... you wrote it!" I'm glad it's in the movie, and it is an essential part of that story - but man, that is tough to watch. My wife still hasn't seen all of it. During early test screenings, she'd leave the room before it started playing. I find myself looking away from it, even to this day.

y'all i can't believe in 2 days, doctor sleep movie will be turning 5 years old... where has the time gone!

He deserved better

Is there any one thing that you've written/directed that scares you more than anything else you've created? Or perhaps something you've created that you thought was so scary it shouldn't be made public and you cut it?

The scene that scared me the most in my career was the baseball boy sequence of DOCTOR SLEEP. I knew the story needed the scene, it was an essential moment, and I was following the blueprint that Stephen King had laid out in the novel, but still... I'd thought we could sidestep a lot of the trauma by filming around the actual violence. I figured keeping all of it off screen and only focusing on a closeup of Jacob's face would help soften the impact, but Jacob delivered such a realistic and heartbreaking performance that the scene felt even more brutal than I'd thought it would be. (I always try to mention here - Jacob was absolutely fine. He had prepared the performance with his father in the weeks leading up to the shoot, and he hopped up off the ground after the first take with a big grin on his face. He knew he'd leveled all of us, he high-fived his dad and sauntered over to the craft service table while we stood there speechless and with tears in our eyes.) That scene affected all of us very deeply, and it remains the scariest thing I've ever filmed. I cut it back several times in the edit, and even that didn't do anything to dull the impact. When I showed the film to Stephen King, he said "I love the movie... but that baseball boy scene is a bit much though" and I didn't know what to say besides "... you wrote it!" I'm glad it's in the movie, and it is an essential part of that story - but man, that is tough to watch. My wife still hasn't seen all of it. During early test screenings, she'd leave the room before it started playing. I find myself looking away from it, even to this day.

Every Film I Watch In 2023:

259. Doctor Sleep (2019)

Well, hi there.

Rebecca Ferguson as Rose the Hat DOCTOR SLEEP (2019) - dir. Mike Flanagan

DOCTOR SLEEP (2019) dir. Mike Flanagan

"When we called him and said, ‘Hey, do you want to play this part?’ he was real excited about it, and he was like, ‘Oh yeah, I'm gonna… I have a great idea. This is going to be really scary.’ And I was like, ‘Okay, sure.’ And we all showed up full of swagger. It was like, yeah, ‘We're just gonna roll. We're gonna have somebody down there flicking the blood, because we want a little bit of splash on his chin.’ Not what you guys saw. That was a little more than we thought would happen. And Rebecca, who’s pretty fearless, was full of attitude. And when she met Jacob – he had been doing another movie, so we never rehearsed with him. I would talk to his father and he's like, ‘We're rehearsing ourselves. And it's really good. It's really good. It's really upsetting.’

He's the sweetest, most charming kid you'll ever meet. Rebecca was even, ‘Oh, get ready, Jacob! We're going to mess you up! Oh, True Knot, we're coming to get him.’ That whole group of actors, they're the bad guys. They get to strut around on set in cool costumes and say cool stuff. So they showed up to it just cocky. We started with Jacob. When we rehearsed, we didn't put any emotion into it. I was like, ‘Jacob, don't scream. We're just going to walk through it mechanically, so you don't get traumatized. We'll save it.’ … We started on him. We started on his frontal and his profile, which were running simultaneously. He's like, ‘No, I got this.’ I was like, ‘Do you want to do a dry run? You want to do anything with it?’ He said, ‘Nope, I'm good.’ And we all went to the monitor.

Rebecca gets all into character and everybody's ready. And [Jacob’s] dad leans over to me and he's like, ‘You have no idea what you're in for.’ He was kind of smirking. And I was like, ‘Okay, like, we know this is going to be a disturbing scene. It's gonna be fine, though.’ He's just smirking. He knows what's coming. We don't know. And, the general idea was, stuff's always worse in the movie than it is on the set. Like on set, the stuff tends to be fun and silly. And Jacob just lets loose. And it's what you see in the movie. He's just screaming and begging, and he’s ad-libbing, you know? He's just throwing in, ‘Please.’ And Rebecca can't get her lines out. He's just screaming over, and he's crying. And Rebecca comes in like, ‘Uh, yeah, this, this is, this is going to hurt, because fear purifies steam.’ And then she starts crying. And we’re in the van. At the time we had all the monitors in this ride, we're all in there, just staring at it, horrified. We get through to the end of the take. I’m too shocked to call cut. He's just dead. He died, and we’re all just staring at it. And I looked over to [producer] Trevor Macy and I was like, ‘What have we done?’

And Jacob's dad is just grinning. So Jacob hops up off the ground. Just, popped. There’s blood all over him. Half the crew is gone. Like, they have abandoned their posts. So during the shot, grips and electricians and stuff were like, ‘Nope.’ And they just walked away. … Jacob hopped up and his dad kind of smirked at him and they, I'll never forget it. He hopped up, walked past his dad, and they high five. His dad just put his hands up to high five, Jacob walked over to crafty to eat candy, but we were all like crying and fucked up.

[On the day he turned 12, Jacob Tremblay had to act out everyone’s worst fear: dying.] We brought out a birthday cake after [the scene]. This is all true. We had a cake that was made in the shape of the baseball jersey with the number 19. It was red velvet cake. So when you cut it up, it was red inside. And we brought that out and sang to him. It was before we saw what he was going to do, and we were all feeling really just, ‘It’s just another day.’ But then we saw what he did, and we all felt awful. We brought it out. We had cake. We sang. He's covered with blood. There are hilarious pictures of him and he’s just [with a thumbs up] with the cake and the blood. And then he just laughed and said good night. You know, ‘That was so fun everybody, bye!’ And he left and the cast recovered.

[Ewan McGregor and Cliff Curtis didn’t share a scene with Jacob Tremblay, so they weren’t on set for the murder. They showed up after, genuinely curious how things had gone.] We're all still shaking [when they show up]. Rebecca Ferguson just doesn't want to talk about it. And Ewan’s like, ‘How’d it go with the kid?’ And she’s like, ‘I don’t even want to talk about it.’ She did all of her stuff – all the shots of her when she talks to him, when he's like, ‘Is this going to hurt?’ And she's like, ‘Yessss!’ And like all the roaring in his face and stuff… he was gone. We did that after Jacob left set. She couldn't look him in the eye and do that" - Mike Flanagan on how Basball Boy scene was filmed (ReelBlend podcast)

Rebecca Ferguson as Rose the Hat in Doctor Sleep

Horrorween Day 28 / 31: Doctor Sleep (2019) dir. Mike Flanagan: "You can put things from the Overlook away in boxes, but not memories. They are the real ghosts. You take them with you."