Author Stephen King personally requested that the violence be upped in new dystopian film The Long Walk, an adaptation of his 1979 novel.
The 77-year-old’s only demand for director Francis Lawrence (The Hunger Games: Catching Fire) and screenwriter JT Mollner (Strange Darling) was that the film showed its teenage characters getting shot.
“If you look at these superhero movies, you’ll see some supervillain who’s destroying whole city blocks, but you never see any blood,” King said. “And man, that’s wrong. It’s almost, like, pornographic.”
“I said, if you’re not going to show it, don’t bother. And so they made a pretty brutal movie,” the writer of The Shining and Carrie told The Times.
Praising King, Mollner said at Comic-Con in July: “I knew that Stephen King wanted us to go all the way. I knew Lionsgate wanted us to go all the way. If this book got into the wrong hands, studio or filmmakers.
“It could’ve been neutered,” he added. “So I’m very grateful we were able to keep the teeth that the book has.”
The Long Walk focuses on a group of teenage boys who are forced to participate in a deadly high-stakes contest by a totalitarian regime where they must continuously walk at a certain speed or face execution by their military escort.
The film stars David Jonsson (Industry), Ben Wang (Karate Kid: Legends), Charlie Plummer (Lean on Pete) and Cooper Hoffman, the son of the late Oscar winner Philip Seymour Hoffman.
The 22-year-old actor was just 10 when his father died in 2014 from an apparent drug overdose.
Hoffman plays The Long Walk’s main protagonist, Raymond Garraty, who also has a dead father.
Asked by GQ if he had any apprehension toward the role, he said: “Oh my God, how can you not? How can you not see in bold letters, ‘HIS DAD DIED’? It’s just going to be there.”
He eventually came around to the idea of the movie, realising it could be healing not only for him but for those who’ve also experienced a similar loss.
“When your trauma is on display for the world, there’s no actually hiding it,” Hoffman said. “I’m like, ‘I might as well talk about it,’ or, ‘I might as well put it into something.’”
The Long Walk will be released in cinemas on 12 September.
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