“I wanted him to leave being intact,” the director said while celebrating the film’s 35th anniversary at the TCM Classic Film Festival.
Misery doesn’t pull any punches when it comes to the violence and torture of its main character, Paul Sheldon (James Caan).
But director Rob Reiner did make a key change from the original Stephen King novel on which the 1990 film is based. In the book, Annie Wilkes (Kathy Bates) chops off romance novelist Paul Sheldon’s feet as part of her efforts to entrap him permanently in her home. As a former nurse, she handles the operation with medical meticulousness and cauterizes the wounds with a blowtorch.
However, Reiner thought Sheldon should be merely badly injured, not permanently maimed. Screenwriter William Goldman disagreed, and the two went back and forth on the issue, with Reiner winning in the end. Annie “hobbles” Paul, using a sledgehammer to crush the bones in his ankles.
But Reiner, who has spoken about the change before, clarified his reasons for the decision at the 2025 TCM Classic Film Festival over the weekend. “It wasn’t because I wanted it to be less gruesome,” he told TCM host Dave Karger. “He goes through this whole experience of being essentially tortured and jailed by this number one fan. He’s written this other book, which she makes him burn.”
“My thought was he always wanted to go beyond Misery and I wanted him to leave being intact,” Reiner continued. “He’s still hobbled and all that, but he’s now a full person, so I didn’t want to have him not have feet at the end.”
For Bates’ part, she was disappointed in the change (and in the removal of a scene in which Annie runs over a state trooper with a lawnmower). “Everybody said you shouldn’t have to lose something after you’ve learned something,” she reflected. “I didn’t feel that way at all. Because I thought it was so beautiful.”
“It was like being the nurse – scalpel, cauterize, the whole thing,” she added. “It had a beautiful poetic progression.”
Um, sure, Kathy Bates, if you say so. She did win an Oscar for her performance, after all.
