Stephen King has slammed the film adaptations of his stories Graveyard Shift and The Shining, and praised those of Cujo, Stand By Me and The Shawshank Redemption in a wide-ranging interview with Deadline.

The Q and A with the bestselling author, which was held “several” years ago but never published, was released for the first time by the film site alongside the news that director and writer Josh Boone has scripted an adaptation of King’s recent novel Revival. Boone has also been working on King’s epic, post-apocalyptic novel The Stand, but has put that aside while he focuses on Revival.

Jack Nicholson in The Shining is as crazy as a shithouse rat. All he does is get crazier Stephen King

Speaking to Deadline about what Hollywood owes to authors when adapting their novels, King said that all he asks when signing over a work is a dollar, and “approvals over the screenwriter, the director and the principal cast”. The novelist has long offered film students the opportunity to try their hands at adapting those of his stories that are not under contract for a single US dollar, and has never, he told Deadline, “put up a red light to anybody about anything that they wanted to do. Because if they want to make changes, if they want to be a little bit out on the edge, I’m all for it. I like it.”

Revealing that he would “love to work” with Lars Von Trier one day on one of his books, King said his favourite adaptations of his work were The Shawshank Redemption, the story of the wrongfully imprisoned Andy Dufresne, and Stand By Me, about four boys who set out to find a body. The adaption of his tale of a rabid dog, Cujo, is the best “of the smaller pictures”.

His least favourites, he admitted, included Graveyard Shift, which was made in 1990, and which he called “just kind of a quick exploitation picture… I guess there are a number of pictures that I feel like, a little bit like, ‘yuck’,” said King. “I could do without all of the Children of the Corn sequels. I actually like the original pretty well. I thought they did a pretty good job on that.”

Stanley Kubrick’s adaptation of The Shining, which King has long been critical of, also came in for a drubbing in the Deadline interview. “I think The Shining is a beautiful film and it looks terrific and as I’ve said before, it’s like a big, beautiful Cadillac with no engine inside it … I kept my mouth shut at the time, but I didn’t care for it much,” said King.

“The character of Jack Torrance has no arc in that movie. Absolutely no arc at all. When we first see Jack Nicholson, he’s in the office of Mr Ullman, the manager of the hotel, and you know then he’s crazy as a shithouse rat. All he does is get crazier. In the book, he’s a guy who’s struggling with his sanity and finally loses it. To me, that’s a tragedy. In the movie, there’s no tragedy because there’s no real change.”

Boone, speaking to Deadline about his planned adaptation of Revival, said that what the novelist “does so well is, he invests you in these characters with all their mundane lives and all the things people think about and worry about. Only then does he introduce a supernatural element, and those characters are so beautifully built that you are willing to go with it.

“The movies based on King’s books that don’t work so well are the ones that don’t take the heart of the characters that beat in the books,” said Boone, who recently directed the adaptation of John Green’s The Fault in Our Stars. “I’m a huge John Carpenter fan, but on Christine, there’s an aching sadness and deep character development in the book that’s just not in that movie. What I’d like to do is Anthony Minghella-depth adaptations of King’s books, if that ambition makes sense.”