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Would you say that’s how you modernized what is pretty much the traditional the monster movie?

Frank Darabont: “Yeah, well, I think well, it might be on the surface of it, but to me it’s a throwback to Paddy Chayefsky, it’s a throwback to Shakespeare. It’s people at each other. It’s not so much about the cool, the unbelievably cool creatures that we’ve got working in this thing. It’s not really about that.

What this is about it’s about fear. It’s fear, and it’s about what does fear compel people to do, especially when you throw people into the dark and scare the s**t out of them as this character says at one point. You take all the rules away, then what? How primitive do people get? It’s Lord of the Flies that happens to have some cool monsters in it.”

Marcia Gay Harden: “I feel it’s as much about the question of what’s out there, that fear, that not knowing, as the fact of what’s out there. So there’s this interesting balance. You see the horrible thing but not all of it. You see the tentacle but not all of it. And then you’re back in the room and the adrenalin and the sweat and the stench builds up. People behave in horrible ways and then something else happens, and one of those things gets in. And without the human balance, it would be shot after shot of, ‘Ahhhh..ahhhh….,’ which is to me not near as interesting as, like you said, The Lord of the Flies. How do people behave? That was the fun of it.

Frank was like, I want to say he was the director, but he really wasn’t. He was like a conductor, better, he was the ringmaster holding this brown cigarette constantly, a skinny brown cigarette in his hand, standing over behind the bay of monitors watching it and yelling, ‘Bring this in!’ And then seeing something that excited him, saying, ‘Yeah! Yeah!’ Like really loud. And then, ‘F**k…..what do I have to do?’ It was like… How many extras were there every day?”

Frank Darabont: “Anywhere from, depending on the day, anywhere from 50-80.”

Marcia Gay Harden: “And five of them are 700 years old and they stood. They did, and they stood up without a complaint at all. It would have never happened on the lot. But completely acting and being a part of it, so it wasn’t just your camera. Really it was like a ringmaster, it was very exciting.”

Frank Darabont: “I’ve gotten louder as I’ve gotten…”

Marcia Gay Harden: “I like loud.”

Laurie Holden: “Well, you had to be. You were conducting an orchestra in the store.”

Frank Darabont: “The thing is, I had a microphone and speakers all over the store and it’s like, ‘Okay, cut, ahhhhhh! He’s screaming. There’s a f**king thing swooping. Oh my God! Run, ahhhhh!’ I was narrating through the whole thing. I used to direct very quietly. I used to whisper in actors’ ears.”

Marcia Gay Harden: “But it’s not like a screamer. It’s not like the thing they got on the internet. It wasn’t that.”

Frank Darabont: “No. It’s like I turned into Dick Donner.”

Marcia Gay Harden: “This is what I mean – you didn’t have to question him or what is he thinking. It’s, ‘Just do this and do it now!’”

Laurie Holden: “I mean Frank is like a kid in a candy store, he’s so excited about what he does. I know that Constantine [Nasr] is making the documentary. I know that you, Constantine, have caught Frank behind the monitor like a little kid watching. ‘Then the bird comes in…’ You were like a five year old. Everyone just wanted to see him smile and so happy because, you know, you’re so in love with this project, and you believe in everybody so much. It was a wonderful thing to be a part of.”

For the actors, can you talk about your characters in this? Are you married and you have a son?

Thomas Jane: “We’re married, right.”

Laurie Holden: “Not to each other.”

Thomas Jane: “Well in the book, we make love, up in the manager’s office which is just only in the Stephen King book. It’s like he’s trying everything he can to get back to his wife and his kid’s sleeping. He’s upstairs schtooping Amanda in the manager’s office. It’s like what happens to you when in times of stress and fear and duress and you never know if you’re going to make it out of there alive. And for some reason in the book, you’re with the hero, you know? Right there with him. But never, in a movie, you’d be like, that guy needs to die. And he would!”

Frank Darabont: “I’m so not getting away with that on screen. Not even trying.”

Laurie Holden: “I’m married to somebody else in the film, and I’m one of the leaders on the good side of the aisle. There’s a bad side of the aisle and a good side of the aisle, depending on who you speak to, of course…Marcia. But we’re more like surrogates to each other. There’s more of a kind, emotional relationship as opposed to a sexual, romantic one - a good support system for one another.”

Thomas Jane: “Yeah, we kind of form a little family, sort of surrogate family where my son and I’m a father and she becomes the mother to the son. We become a little unit as we’re trying to get through this nightmare together. It’s really kind of fascinating.”

Laurie Holden: “As people did in the Dome. You think about Katrina and what was going on in the Dome. It was incredible who helped who, who was stealing from who. There was violence. They’ve just been through something not as apocalyptic or as scientific, whatever your point of view is, but we’ve been through something that is heinous.”

Thomas Jane: “How many rapes happened in the Dome while people were trapped in that Dome? Disgusting number of rapes were happening and there was even a couple of murders, I think. It’s amazing how quickly people turn into animals.”

Laurie Holden: “Or not always animals, because I don’t think everybody in The Mist turns into an animal, I think that it’s a morality tale of what happens to people under dire circumstances – fear. And some people rise to the occasion, some people become leaders, like your character, and some people become mothers like my character, and some people become religious crusaders like Mrs. Carmody. She definitely is a leader.”

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