Set in Desperation, Nev., the story follows an incarnation of evil, named Tak, as it escapes from a mine and inhabits one person after another, inhabiting a body, wreaking havoc, then moving on to another body after its current host is spent. When the story opens, Tak's already overtaken Desperation cop Collie Entragian (Perlman), turning him into a lunatic who torments a group of people who must join forces to stop Tak before it's too late. The group includes two couples (Thomas and Gish, Frewer and Sylva Kelegian), a popular writer (Skerritt), the writer's aide (Weber), Desperation's longtime veterinarian (Durning) and a God-fearing boy (Shane Baboucha).

Perlman, Skerritt, Gish and Garris recently chatted with Science Fiction Weekly about Desperation.

Ron Perlman, how much did you know about Desperation before coming on board the film?

Perlman: Nothing. This is a book that I had not read. This is not one of his more recent books. In fact, I think they've been trying to get this made for 12 years. It went through many, many different incarnations until it finally made it as a miniseries for ABC. So the very first I read of it was the script, which was King's own adaptation of his novel. It was way cool. This was one of those things where I read 20 pages and I was in. They gave me the name of the character that I was to be looking at. I called back my agent and said, "You're kidding, right? Is it really Collie Entragian I'm looking at?" I was thrilled. He was like a three-ring circus, this character, incredibly theatrical.Give us a sense of Collie and what happens to him.

Perlman: He commits some very, very gruesome acts that are very cold-blooded, very sudden and very unpredictable, and they're without compunction, which is really the scariest part of it all. There's no censoring, there's no value judgment to this guy's bloodlust. And he's smart. Because he's a Stephen King character, his turn of a phrase and his theatrical point of view is really, really smart. So there's an added perverseness to all of it that make it incredibly compelling to watch. ... I hope. I'm just giving you the sense I had of him from reading the script and playing the role. This is yet another major makeup role for you. How does Collie's look evolve ... or devolve?

Perlman: When you first see me it just looks like I have a horrible sunburn, with a few blisters forming. And then that just becomes more and more intensified until I'm almost unrecognizable. So there were phases to it. And I had my genius makeup artist, Jake Garber, who I met on the set of Star Trek: Nemesis and brought to Hellboy. I won't do a prosthetic job unless Jake's available from here on out. He's just an amazing piece of manpower, and he saves the company and myself so much time. It looks amazing when he's finished with it.

Tom Skerritt, what would you say is at the heart of Desperation?

Skerritt: Morally or storywise? I guess they're one and the same in this case, with Stephen King, isn't it? Oh, God, well, I hadn't really looked at it so analytically as to look for a philosophical statement. It holds all the way through as a piece of entertainment, but I would think it has a little bit to do with Jean-Paul Sarte's edict of the play he wrote, No Exit, which is "hell is ourselves." We are our own danger, and this is a situation that forces some people to really deal with an extraordinary situation. And it's about how we deal with it. How was Desperation as a shoot?

Skerritt: We had a lot of fun doing it. There were a lot of things that King loaded it up with, that you had to look at and say, "What?" So you recognized it as Stephen King's humor. There are those little asides he has here and there. You really see it with Ron Perlman's character, how he plays it. Ron has a ball with it, and that's just what Stephen would love to see. In the face of really dark, dark things, there's always light. Stephen King has a knack for it. If the people involved get it, they can portray it. Ron has done this. Mick has done a lot of Stephen King, so he knows King's humor and was able to get it [across] pretty much.

Annabeth Gish, what interested you in Desperation?

Gish: I'm such a big fan. Stephen King wrote a book called On Writing, and although I've never been a horror genre connoisseur, shall we say, I've always had tremendous respect for how prolific he is. That book, along with Annie Lamont's Bird by Bird, is such an accurate tool and resource for writers—artists, for anybody creative who wants to create something. Plus, I'd never done horror before. I'd done The X-Files, but that was more sci-fi. So I was just really excited to do it, and the experience did not let me down. I had a really excellent time on this show.How did you get on with the cast?

Gish: We really did have a ball. It was a motley crew of actors as well as a motley crew of characters that we played. Steven Weber entertained us with his jocularity. Charles Durning is such a legend. And I adored Mick Garris. I will work with him time and time again, I hope. He's a master of King, but he's also a very proficient, efficient and, I think, astute director. Mick Garris, how differently do you approach a King feature versus a telemovie versus a miniseries?

Garris: Well, for me, I don't watch much television, so I don't really discern between television and movies in the making of them. Obviously you have to have commercials and censorship and broadcast standards in mind when you're doing television, but in terms of the actual physical construction of a movie, I don't really treat them differently. The budgets are very different sometimes, but the budget for Desperation wasn't that different from the budget for Sleepwalkers, and, in fact, my last feature, Riding the Bullet, cost less than half of what Desperation cost. That being said, the Desperation script by King was originally written as a feature film, and we were going to do it at New Line back in 1998, and we ran up against the world of horror being given away to teenagers and self-reflexive wink-wink, nudge-nudge movies in the Scream mold and everything that happened after that. So to do a real serious horror film that went for the throat, so to speak, was not something the company was prepared to do at the time. So it's ironic that it turned into a television. By the way, the last hour of The Shining, I think that would have gotten an R rating had it been a theatrical movie.To your thinking, what's unique about Desperation?

Garris: The thing that I think is most important about it is the cast being so special, especially in terms of a genre film. I'd also say the theme, which comes back from The Stand, which is so large and largely writ. It will resonate very well in the red states, I guess, the spiritual qualities of the story. Although it is spiritual I wouldn't call it Christian, but I guess some could. It's about belief, and King is a believer and I'm not. But it's an interesting approach to the great good-versus-evil tale.King is so prolific that there are lots of King-generated films and shows in need of a director. How do you end up on one project and not another? Does he say, "Mick, this one's perfect for you"? Do you say, "Stephen, I love this one, please let me take a crack at it"?

Garris: It's both. There are three guys. There's Frank Darabont in the world of big-budget studio adaptations. There's me. And there's Craig Baxley, who's actually been doing more of the network ones lately. But in the case of Desperation, we went into this producing it together way back when, as a feature. When we final got it going as a network film, it was just a progression from that many years ago. In the case of Riding the Bullet, which we did as a feature, I'd read the story online like everyone else when it first came out and asked him if it's something I could do. Then I wrote a spec script of it and we managed to get it going. His involvement was really just giving his blessing and allowing his name to be in the title. So it works both ways.