Edgar Wright has taken on no easy feat: He’s bringing a novel accurate adaptation of Stephen King’s The Running Man to us. Co-written with Michael Bacall, the film stars Glen Powell as Ben Richards and, from the trailer, does look more like the novel!
At New York Comic Con, I was lucky enough to talk with Wright on the press line about the film and the adaptation process and one of the things I asked him about was how to include important aspects of a character’s journey into the film while not being able to include every single thing about them. For me, there is a chapter that informed so much about Ben’s love for his family but it also happens a great deal into the novel. Meaning, that information has to be played out in different ways.
“It’s obviously important in the movie to understand why he would… he’s going onto a show which nobody has won and what are the circumstances that lead him to signing on the doted line? He isn’t doing it at gunpoint, but he’s sort of essentially emotionally blackmailed into it, but he’s doing it for the sake of his family,” Wright said on Ben Richard’s motivation for joining “The Running Man.”
Wright went on to talk about how he and Bacall approached Ben. “But then there’s also a point where we always thought about it, like when we were working on the script, it’s almost like a character going off to war and in sort of wartime movies. The idea is ‘I don’t know if I’ll ever see you again.’ It is a very emotional, I say “goodbye” but it’s not framed like a goodbye, but it feels like it is, and so it is really important to have those scenes and we don’t have that specific scene in the film, but I think we have scenes that hopefully have the same emotion.”
I also spoke with Powell about the chapter as well and between the two of them, I cannot wait to see what the team has done when The Running Man hits theaters on November 14.
(featured image: Manoli Figetakis/Getty Images)
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