‘The Running Man’ Director Edgar Wright Talks Stephen King Adaptation

Glen Powell stars in Paramount Pictures’ “THE RUNNING MAN.”

Courtesy of Ross Ferguson/Paramount Pictures

Edgar Wright has crossed the Stephen King threshold—and he’s not looking back.

The acclaimed filmmaker behind such kinetically charged modern classics as Shaun of the Dead, Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, and Baby Driver hopes to get your heart racing again with a new adaptation of The Running Man (now playing; click here for tickets).

Unlike the 1987 version starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, Wright’s movie is incredibly faithful to its dystopian source material—initially written by King under his mysterious Richard Bachman alias.

“The original novel is so vivid and so dense with detail,” Wright, who also co-wrote the script with Michael Bacall, recently told me over the phone. “To have that text as your starting point [is wonderful]. There are things in the film that we’ve kept very faithful [while] there are things that we’ve changed. But there’s also things we’ve expanded on. To have this incredibly detailed, immersive world in the book was just a joy to adapt.”

Twisters and Chad Powers vet Glen Powell steps into the worn-down shoes of Ben Richards, a down-on-his-luck father who reluctantly joins the titular game show to give his family a better life. As a contestant on The Running Man, Ben must do whatever it takes to survive for a total of 30 days, evading detection from both the public and a skilled group of killers known as the Hunters (led by Lee Pace’s Evan McCone).

Mr. Richards is willing to play by the rules, but what about the all-powerful Network? Can oily executive Dan Killian (Josh Brolin) and charismatic Running Man host Bobby T. (Colman Domingo) really be trusted to honor their word?

That’s the billion-dollar question (literally!) as Ben runs for his life (again, also literal) in this timely tale of the haves versus the have-nots that also dips into our modern-day obsession with reality television and the slippery slope of AI.

Edgar and I discuss all of that and more in the interview below…

***WARNING! The following contains spoilers for the film!***

Josh Weiss: Why did you feel it was the right time to re-adapt The Running Man?

Edgar Wright: I started reading Stephen King books when I was probably about 12 or 13. He was one of the first “grown-up” authors I read in my formative years. I read The Running Man novel when it was republished after his pseudonym was discovered. They re-released four of the Bachman books as a paperback compendium and The Running Man was one of the novels. Even though I was 14 and wasn’t a film director yet, I’d visualized that book in my head. I’d read the book, but wasn’t old enough to see the Arnold Schwarzenegger version when it first came out. [But when I finally did see the movie], I was surprised, because it’s wildly different.

The 1987 version is a very loose adaptation and they do their own thing with it. So I guess in my head I just thought, “Well, there’s another great movie in here.” There was a faithful adaptation of the book to do. I actively looked into the rights about 15 years ago and that wasn’t possible. But then, four years ago, producer Simon Kinberg emailed me to say, “Hey, is it true you have an interest in The Running Man? We have the rights. Do you want to talk?” And I was like, “Absolutely! Yes! I’ve actively thought about this film!” The whole process, as wild and intense as it’s been in the time frame that we made it, I have to pinch myself that there’s now a movie version of this book I read when I was 14.”

Josh Weiss: Speaking of the 1987 film, I love the little homage of putting Arnold’s face on the currency of this dystopian America. How did that come about?

Wright: Even though we’re doing something radically different to his version, we’re still big fans of Arnold. So we just thought it was a fun nod to the 1987 film. We don’t really consider it a remake—I would call it a new adaptation of the source material—but there’s a few little nods to the original film in there, and that’s one of them. It’s just a funny idea as well, because the Stephen King novel is set in the year 2025. We don’t say what year it is in the film, but we always imagined that it was an alternate 2025, a retro futuristic 2025. As if this was Stephen King’s imagined version of 2025 when he published the book in 1982. As such, we thought, “Well, in this alternate reality, they’ve changed the rules and people born outside the United States can run for president.” And so, the former Governor of California, Arnold Schwarzenegger, had become the president of the United States.

Josh Weiss: Stephen King was an executive producer on the film. Any specific interactions with him along the way?

Wright: As I was starting to develop the movie, I didn’t get in touch with him until closer to it happening. He would have been well aware that I was working on it, but I didn’t want to be the boy who cried wolf and contact him until I knew it was definitely happening. Because the idea of talking to him about it and then it not coming together would have been so heartbreaking. I basically left it until the last minute. And as an executive producer, he has to sign off on the adaptation. Before getting into prep, Michael Bacall and I sent him [the script] … Obviously, we were very anxious to see what he thought, [but] he flipped over it. He loved what we kept and really loved what we changed. The great thing is that he gave us a big thumbs up. The tougher thing was now the added pressure of, “Not only do I have to live up to the film in my head, I have to live up to the film that’s in his as well” [laughs]. Throughout the entire production, my main motivation was not letting Stephen King down.

Josh Weiss: The town of Derry, which is briefly referenced in the book, plays a fairly sizable role in the movie. We’ve seen it depicted onscreen before and it’s currently the backdrop of an HBO series. What was your vision for bringing this key King location to life?

Wright: Weirdly enough, my cinematographer on The Running Man, Chung Chung-hoon, shot IT: Chapter One. He was kind of well-versed in Derry. The Richard Bachman book has such incredible world-building and detail, so it was really about using that as a jumping off point … There were lots of things from the novel that we were able to put in the movie. And then there are some nice little Easter eggs for King-heads. In Derry itself, when Glen is dressed as the priest, there’s a diner called Tabby’s diner, [named] after Steven’s wife [Tabitha]. There’s a nice little Easter egg earlier in the Network building when you see the locker room that has all the different color-coded jumpsuits for all the other game shows. The surnames above the lockers are all surnames of actors who appeared in King adaptations onscreen. You have Nicholson, Walken, Spacek, Stanton, Holbrook, Freeman, Bates, etc.

Josh Weiss: I might be way off on this because I didn’t get a good look at the sign, but the lauded Chinese restaurant that Ben goes to in Derry—is that Jade of the Orient where the Losers Club reunite as adults in IT?

Wright: It is indeed, yes. Well spotted.

Josh Weiss: “Heartbreaker” is among my Top 5 Rolling Stones songs. I don’t think you could have gone with a better track for Elton going full Kevin McAllister on the Network-run police. But I’m curious if you considered any other musical choices.

Wright: No. Actually, I have to credit Michael Bacall because that was in his first draft of the script. I feel like I first heard about “Heartbreaker” through a Stephen King novel—unless I’m getting it mixed up with “Dancing with Mr. D.” But either way, I was shocked to discover that it had never been used in a movie before. So many Stones songs have been licensed for movie—literally hundreds—and “Heartbreaker” had never actually been in a movie before, which is wild to me.

Josh Weiss: That scene is so much fun. Can you talk about how it came together?

Wright: This would speak to everything in Baby Driver and Last Night in Soho—or even “Don’t Stop Me Now” in Shaun of the Dead—but if you do a scene like that, you have to make sure you can get the song before you start designing it. You don’t want to be in a situation where you’ve designed the whole sequence around a song and then it’s like, “Oh, we can’t actually clear it.” So we’re always very careful to make sure that it’s at least possible. We storyboarded that whole sequence, did an animatic, and then started designing it to go with the music. There’s couple of sequences in the movie, like the Elton sequence and end credits, that are choreographed to [a certain] track.

Weiss: This is an incredibly faithful adaptation of the source material. The most notable change you’ve made is to the ending. At what point did you and Michael decide to veer away from King’s conclusion?

Wright: Well, we haven’t really been talking about that in the interviews, so I don’t really want to get into it too much. The only thing I’d say, is that Stephen very much approved of what we’d done. He was curious about how we were going to handle it, and it was a huge endorsement from him that he really liked what we’d done with the ending. So we were happy with that.

Weiss: Your movie is the second Richard Bachman adaptation this year after The Long Walk. What do you think the books written under that pseudonym have to say about where we are as a society today?

Wright: It’s kind of a coincidence that The Long Walk and The Running Man show up in the same year. But weirdly enough, those things are just in the ether. They’re both dystopian movies. Dystopian fiction and dystopian films are [all about] holding up a fun house mirror to our reality. It’s both prescient and also disturbing, how far ahead of the game he was in terms of what he’d written—and how little has changed at the same time.

Weiss: Was there a specific element of the book you felt you had to really nail with this adaptation?

Wright: There’s lots of things about the book that we wanted to bring to the screen, but there were three key that were not really reflected in the previous adaptation. Number one is who Ben Richards is and the fact that he’s an out of work dad. He’s been blacklisted from work, he’s desperate for money because his daughter is sick, and he and wife are struggling to provide. So he goes to the Network building to compete on one of the games. He doesn’t want to be on The Running Man. He wants to risk injury rather than death. But the key thing is he’s going there by choice. Yes, it’s out of total desperation for money, but he’s doing it voluntarily. There’s something really powerful to me about him just walking in from the street to compete on the games.

The second thing would be that the entire story is told from Ben Richards’ perspective. A lot of other films of this ilk (not just the previous adaptation) would have a scene where they cut back to the villains at Network headquarters. But for me, it was always really powerful that the book is all told from Ben’s perspective. [I felt] it would make the movie much more intense by living vicariously through him, being on the game with him. You don’t have any information that Ben Richards doesn’t. You’re seeing the world completely through his eyes. All you know about what’s going on in the rest of the game is through the TV—and that might not be entirely true.

The third key thing I would say is how the game works. In the novel and in our movie, the game is out in the world. That was always a really expansive, ambitious part of the novel that I loved and wanted to see onscreen. You leave the Network building, and then, ‘Good luck! It’s up to you! Keep running!’ [He has to] stay alive for 30 days with no strategy, no plan. Just go wherever you want and good luck.

Weiss: Like you said earlier, dystopian fiction is meant to hold a warped mirror up to society. The Running Man is full of modern day parallels—from our obsession with reality TV to a technology capable of putting false words into a person’s mouth (à la AI). Is there a specific message you wanted to get across regarding modern advances and entertainment?

Wright: The foresight he had about where media was going, especially considering he wrote it in 1972, is amazing. But even since the previous adaptation, there’s been 25 years of a certain type of reality TV that’s just exploded. And so, to write it with all the knowledge of that was really interesting. I think we’re now very well aware of how people’s images can be manipulated—not just in reality TV where people can have a villain edit [in which people on the show] are made to be a pantomime villain and hated figure. We’ve all seen that on several different shows.

Beyond that, just in terms of what’s happening on a daily basis, in terms of social media, the idea that AI is quickly making people not trust their own eyes and ears. That’s catching up real fast to the point where we don’t even really have to explain the technology in the film. It’s taken as read that this is possible. One of the lines I really like is when Josh Brolin’s character concedes that they can’t fake the entire show. Humans bring that unpredictable spark and the audience lives for those happy accidents. I like having that one caveat where he’s like, “Yes, we do still need people because they’re random and chaotic and that’s good TV.”

Weiss: We haven’t spoken about your leading man, Glen Powell. What were the conversations you had with him about bringing Ben Richards to life?

Wright: You want to have somebody who has an everyman feel, in the sense that it would be much more exciting to have a relatable character running the gauntlet rather than somebody who’s already an established action hero. Hopefully, the thing that works about the movie is that you worry about Glen, because you know that he’s completely out of his depth. There’s something really exciting about that. There are movies that are not comparable in terms of the characters, but there’s something about the first Die Hard that even though Bruce Willis is a cop, he’s certainly out of his depth. He’s not on home turf, he doesn’t have his shoes on, he’s on his heels for the entire movie. Raiders Lost Ark has a similar feel, where he’s obviously capable and adventurous, but there’s a lot of improvisation and he’s winging it a lot of the time. Something about that in both of those movies creates a level of excitement that isn’t in films where people are already the best at what they do.

Weiss: Now that you’ve got a King adaptation under your belt, is there another one of his books, stories, or novellas you’d like to tackle in future?

Wright: Some of the my favorite ones have already been brilliantly adapted and I wouldn’t even [want to] go near them. Some of the previous film adaptations are some of my favorite films. Carrie is genuinely one of my favorite movies. So don’t know. I’d have to have a think about that…

The Running Man is now playing in theaters nationwide