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Filmmaker Edgar Wright’s latest movie The Running Man is an adaptation of Stephen King’s 1982 novel.Piper Ferguson/Supplied
It’s Stephen King’s Toronto – we’re just living in it. On the same day that King’s eldest son, the bestselling author Joe Hill, was in town on a promotional tour for his new novel, King Sorrow (more on that next week), British filmmaker Edgar Wright was on the other side of the city to present a sneak peek of The Running Man, his new adaptation of King’s 1982 novel. (Both Wright and Hill know each other, but only over text – a plan to connect the two for a last-minute Toronto coffee alas didn’t pan out.)
While The Running Man has already been adapted into a 1987 thriller starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, Wright’s version hews more closely to King’s source material. Here, some time in the near future, a blue-collar worker (Glen Powell) enlists for a reality-TV competition with a killer concept: Survive 30 days while the entire world tries to track you down and murder you, and you get $1-billion. What King once envisioned as far-fetched satire, though, now seems perhaps quaint – which is where Wright, who is best known for his hyperstylized action-comedies (Shaun of the Dead, Baby Driver and the Toronto-set Scott Pilgrim vs. the World), came in to refresh the novel without sacrificing its sick soul.
Ahead of The Running Man’s release this weekend, Wright sat down with The Globe and Mail to talk Stephen King and Toronto.
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I feel like your most recent film, Last Night in Soho, was about the danger of meeting your heroes. And now this film brings you in contact with one of yours, Stephen King.
It’s funny to hear that about Soho – it’s very apt. Sometimes you don’t know what a film is about until you make it. But yes, collaborating with Stephen and eventually meeting him, it’s just been a joy. With his adaptations, he gets the sign-off on the screenplay and some casting. But I’d actually been in e-mail contact with him for years, because 21 years ago, he’d given us a press quote for Shaun of the Dead. And that, for somebody who started reading Stephen King novels way too young, was mind-boggling to me. We’d been in direct contact since Baby Driver, mostly talking about music. He’s a big rock fan, so I’d always be recommending new bands I think he’d like.
When did you let him know you were interested in The Running Man?
I didn’t want to talk to him about it until it was coming closer to fruition, because I didn’t want to be the boy who cried wolf. It would’ve been too heartbreaking to talk to him about the movie and then it not come together. Sending the screenplay for his sign-off, that’s a nerve-wracking thing. Here’s the guy who wrote one of the greatest books on writing! But he loved it, which was an amazing vote of confidence.
I feel you have one of the great success stories justifying the existence of Twitter, too, as you tweeted in 2017 that the one movie you’d like to remake is The Running Man. And here we are.
Well, I guess it’s something. But it’s not the first time I’d answered that question about, “If you could remake one film, what would it be?” And the truth is that I don’t really think of this movie as a remake of the 1987 film. It’d be more accurate to say it’s a new adaptation of the source material. Because the 1987 film is wildly different from the book.
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The novel is set in 2025, which is a neat coincidence. But your film never makes the year explicit.
It’s difficult in sci-fi films to kick things far down the road enough. Escape from New York was 1997, and we’ve sailed way past that. I think Blade Runner was 2017. It felt like the smart thing to do was not put a date on it and just say it’s a different tomorrow. The idea is very much represented in the overall design – a retro-futuristic thing. The book was written in 1972, published in ’82, so it was like, “Well, what if this was the 1980s version of what 2025 might look like?”
You’ve been vocal on the press tour about the importance of seeing this on the big screen, the theatrical experience of it all. Maybe this is me reading too much into it, but the fictional TV network at the heart of this story, its logo is a giant “N” that looked familiar. Is that an intentional dig at Netflix?
[Laughs] My answer, um, I want to say, “pass.” In the book, it’s called “The Network,” so it was obvious that we were going to have an “N.” I think that when we were designing it, at some point it struck us that it looked very much like something else. It was a mischievous image to play with.
You’re in Toronto for the premiere of this film, and it also marks a reunion for you with co-star Michael Cera, Brampton’s finest, who you shot Scott Pilgrim with here so many years ago. Is there a sense of a homecoming for you in that relationship?
A lot of the Scott Pilgrim crew was also on this new movie with me, too, including my co-writer, Michael Bacall. We had a great time in Toronto making it, and you know, in 2009, Michael had turned 21 on the set. And now he’s a father of two! We’ve been friends the entire time, just texting back and forth about nothing at all, for 15 years. So it was eventually funny to say, “Oh, I actually have an important work thing to talk with you about!” I think people will be really surprised by him in this movie. And of course, if you noticed this, the Canadian flag has a very important role in this new movie. It’s the hero.
It’s that sock that Glen’s character is carrying with him, yeah?
The colours, yes. That will be a Globe and Mail scoop for you.
This interview has been condensed and edited.
