Interview: Writer Eric Kripke Talks Adapting THE HOUSE WITH A CLOCK IN ITS WALLS

Arriving into theaters this weekend is director Eli Roth’s The House with a Clock in Its Walls, his adaptation of John Bellairs’ popular children’s book centered around a young orphan named Lewis Barnavelt (Owen Vaccaro), who goes off to live with his estranged uncle Jonathan (Jack Black), only to learn his new guardian is a warlock, and that the world around him is filled with endless magical possibilities. But when a world-ending threat looms over them, it’s up to Lewis, his uncle Jonathan, and their supernaturally inclined neighbor, Mrs. Zimmerman (Cate Blanchett), to save the day.

Daily Dead recently had the opportunity to speak with screenwriter Eric Kripke about his longtime obsession with the book version of The House with a Clock in Its Walls and why he’s always wanted to adapt Bellairs’ story for the big screen. Kripke, the creator behind Supernatural, also discussed how the world of The House with a Clock in Its Walls inspired the Winchester brothers’ universe, how much he enjoyed collaborating with Roth, and more.

Great to speak with you today, Eric, and congratulations on the film. I would love to start at the beginning, because I saw on Twitter you mentioned that this was a book that you had fallen in love with as a kid, and here you are now adapting it for the big screen. Can you talk about your connection with this material and that journey for you personally in terms of making it into an experience for the big screen?

Eric Kripke: Yeah, absolutely. I found the book when I was 10 years old at Lyford Elementary School in Sylvania, Ohio. It blew my mind, and then I went on to voraciously read everything that the author, John Bellairs, wrote. I wrote him my one and only fan letter. He wrote me back, and I have kept that letter in my desk my whole life. I think it was my very first exposure to anything Gothic, anything spooky, and anything supernatural. That genre has been a huge part of my career, and none of it would've happened had I not found those books.

So, I would say my entire interest in the supernatural and the scary stuff comes with a direct straight line from The House with a Clock in Its Walls. Someone asked me, "In what way did it inspire Supernatural?" It inspired its core DNA. The House with A Clock In Its Walls is about a family that fights evil and balances it with their relationships, and it exists in a world where all the folklore in it is folklore that actually exists out in the real world. And that is what Supernatural is, in so many ways. You can trace back the balance of heart and humor and scares from Supernatural directly to my exposure to this book, because I would say they're very similar in tone, and they're very similar in [their] world[s]—that there's a world where the supernatural exists just under the surface of regular Midwestern life, and there's this family that fights it.

Those core ideas were something that had been kicking in my head for a really long time. So, cut to [when] I made Supernatural, but I'm a working screenwriter, too, and every couple of years I would call to check if the rights to The House with a Clock in Its Walls were available, and they never were. It was always my dream because no one was making scary movies for kids anymore in that classic Amblin way, in the way that Gremlins and Goonies and E.T. all have scary moments and real stakes. Those movies were such a seminal influence on my childhood and Eli Roth's childhood, too, and no one's making those movies.

Finally, I was sitting down with Brad Fischer, one of the other producers on the film, and we're buddies from a long time back. He said, "We really should find something together to work on. If you could make one movie, what could it be?" And I gave the answer I always give, which is The House with a Clock in Its Walls. He jotted it down, and then he called me two days later, and he said, "The rights came up available last week. How about you and I buy them?" And so, he and I bought the book, and then out of nowhere, quickly, I had the rights.

It's so funny, and I know that maybe it sounds super douche-y, but not only was it my passion to get the rights to this book, I felt a certain obligation to write it, too, because I can promise you there was no working screenwriter who loved that book more than me, and who cared more about making sure that it was adapted with integrity. So, it's like one of those things where I really needed to write it because I would've been pretty upset if someone else had. And that's the story.

Because this is a book that's meant so much to you, and it's been a part of a lot of kids' experiences growing up, how much weight does that carry on you as the writer to make sure that you really hit those proverbial notes? And is it a different process for you doing this versus something where you have more freedom, and you can make your own rules, like with Supernatural?

Eric Kripke: Yeah. I actually found this process really unexpectedly difficult. Up to that point, I had only written original projects, and when this came up, I was like, "This is gonna be great. All I have to do is adapt someone else's story. I don't have to think up all the raw material." But it turned out to be much, much harder, because they're different mediums, and the core conflict of any book to movie adaptation is that books are inherently internal, and movies are inherently external.

And in a book, all you do is live inside characters' heads, and in a movie, you can almost never actually get inside a character's head unless there's some crappy voiceover. That’s a huge conflict, that's a huge chasm because how do you convey what a character is thinking and convey what they're going through when the book just tells you what they're thinking? So, I found it really hard, because I found that I had to sort of streamline and rework the plot in a way that could illuminate what I loved about the characters, but then you found yourself playing a really scary game of Jenga, because you love it so much, and the last thing you want is this thing to tip over.

You're not doing this for the job, you're not doing this for the money. You're doing it because you love this book. And yet, you have to make changes to honor it. And so, I found it very nail-biting and nerve-rattling to make sure that I could steer this in a way that, I hope people feel, honored the tone and the spirit and the characters of the book even if there are changes made to the story itself.

Once Eli came on board as the director, how was that process working with him? Did he come to you with additional ideas, or did he just fall in love with the script and go with how you had written it?

Eric Kripke: He's amazing. He's really energetic and brilliant and has a ton of great ideas, and I'm very used to collaborating. I come from TV, and so I come from the team sport version of filmmaking. To me, it was very natural to sit down with him, and for him to say, "What if we do this?" He was really great about like, "How do we make this sequence scarier and cooler and more visual and more interesting?" And so I was revising a lot of sequences to make something feel more visual.

His process through the script was us discussing a lot of that, which I thought was really to the story's benefit. He really did such a wonderful job capturing and creating this world that the movie lives in. That came through a lot of conversations, and the man has got a ton of great ideas. Everyone thinks of him as this hard horror guy, but in truth, he's just an Amblin geek like I am, and like so many kids from our generation, too, so we spent a lot of time talking about all these amazing Amblin movies we grew up loving, and how to make this feel like a modern Amblin movie.

And by the way, some of this was happening before Amblin even came on board. All of a sudden, Brad Fischer calls me up one day, and he's like, "You'll never guess who wants to make this." When he told me it was Amblin, I couldn’t believe it. That was like a dream come true, because that's literally the target we've been aiming for since we first started adapting it.

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In case you missed it, read Heather's review of The House with a Clock in Its Walls.