AYESHA RASCOE, HOST:
Stephen King's first novel, which he began as a college freshman in the late '60s and published under a pseudonym in 1979, is finally coming to theaters. "The Long Walk" is set in a dystopian America in which young men are forced to walk until only one survives. Mark Hamill plays the major who oversees this brutal test of endurance, which stems from a post-war decline that's fallen on the country.
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "THE LONG WALK")
MARK HAMILL: (As The Major) We have the means to return to our former glory. Our problem now is an epidemic of laziness. You boys are the answer. The Long Walk is the answer.
RASCOE: Francis Lawrence directed the story for the screen, and he joins us now. Welcome to the program.
FRANCIS LAWRENCE: Thank you very much.
RASCOE: Stephen King's story had a hundred young men on the Long Walk. Your version has 50 participants. What other tweaks did you and screenwriter JT Mollner make to the story? And, like, how much license did you feel, since, you know, this is one of Stephen King's more celebrated works?
LAWRENCE: Yeah. I mean, I feel like we had a lot of license. Stephen really sort of stays out of the process. I mean, he has to obviously approve everything. But I feel like JT - the screenwriter - and I knew what we wanted to focus on, which was primarily the camaraderie of the boys and the relationships. And, you know, we made some tweaks in terms of plot and in terms of some sort of back stories of some of the characters and things like that. We reduced the number of young men from a hundred to 50, but that was primarily for sort of budget reasons. We also, you know, changed the speed with which the walkers are supposed to walk, which in the novella was 4 miles per hour. But now we all have treadmills and we know how fast 4 miles per hour is, so we reduced it to 3. But we made some tweaks.
But, you know, we did all that, and then there's this moment where you sort of cross your fingers and send the script off to Stephen King and hope he goes for it. And he loved everything that we had done with it, and we got to make the movie.
RASCOE: And my understanding is that - is Stephen King said, like, one condition for this film being made was for the teenage characters to be shown being shot. What did you take away from what he meant by that demand?
LAWRENCE: Well, I mean, I think - you know, look, it's a brutal story and it's a brutal book. And what you have is this sort of brutal violence that's cut against and contrasted against this, you know, sometimes really intimate emotion and relationships, and you need both. And I think there's a tendency, especially in Hollywood now, to kind of water that stuff down - to be afraid, to pull back, to not have blood, to not have the violence, which is part of the story.
It was written as an allegory for the Vietnam War at the time. And the violence and what people see and how it traumatizes them and how it affects them, you know, in those kinds of situations is a really important aspect. So if you suddenly are cutting away all the time or watering it down and not having that intensity and that brutality, it sort of castrates the story a bit. And I know that was important to me, and it was also important to Stephen King.
RASCOE: You mentioned this was an allegory for Vietnam and all the thousands of young soldiers being drafted into that war. We have a clip. There's a moment from where Ray and the other characters - and Ray is played by Cooper Hoffman, Philip Seymour Hoffman's son. The other characters - early on in the film, they put the war's influence in clear view.
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "THE LONG WALK")
COOPER HOFFMAN: (As Ray) I mean, even though only 50 of us get picked in the lottery, all of the boys in this country put in for it. I'm not exaggerating. Everybody puts in for it, even though it's not required, 'cause we're all so [expletive] desperate. What does that tell you?
UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR: (As character) Boy...
HOFFMAN: (As Ray) Nobody signs up for this. Not really.
RASCOE: Obviously, Vietnam at this point is a long time ago, and young people today will not have much connection to it. But do you think that there are other connections that they could make?
LAWRENCE: A hundred percent. So I think one of the things that we tried to focus on in this adaptation and one of the things that I sort of gravitated toward, which is this sort of idea of desperation that you just heard about in that clip. And I think, you know, you look at the U.S. and you sort of think about the loss of the American dream and - right? - and how hard it is to sort of earn a living that will put a roof over your head and food on your table. And it's not just in the U.S. It's kind of all around the world, this sort of sense of financial nihilism and desperation that people feel. And that's the reason that all these young men are joining this walk.
RASCOE: As a director, I guess, what was it like working with Cooper Hoffman? And how do you give, you know, actors kind of free rein to guide kind of the motivations of their characters?
LAWRENCE: Well, you know, it varies from person to person, obviously. I worked with his father on "The Hunger Games" series, so I knew Phil before I knew Cooper. I had not met Cooper when I was working with Phil. And so Cooper and I met first over Zoom about this. And he was really the only person that I knew for a fact before even meeting them that I wanted them to play one of the characters, and I knew I wanted him to play Ray Garraty.
So we had a Zoom and we talked about the story. And he knew I had worked with his dad, and we talked about that a little bit. But we - you know, we just talked about the character. And then over time, it started to become very, very clear to him and then me that there was this real sort of parallel with his own personal life. And that is definitely not something I would ever force upon any actor I work with, right? Like, that's their choice, to sort of pull from their own life experiences and what they may be going through and how their reality may line up with a character they're playing. And for Cooper and with this role, there were certain parallels for him that he just made connections with and understood and I think really added layers of, you know, emotional complexity that I'm not sure anybody else would have been able to bring, just because of that kind of life experience.
RASCOE: You directed all but one of "The Hunger Games" films, including one coming out next year. That's also a dystopian reality, a deadly contest among young people. Was there something that you brought from that experience of filming those types of movies that you brought to this? And then how do you make this story kind of stand apart? You know, 'cause people are going to bring the parallels.
LAWRENCE: I knew they would because people like putting things in boxes. But they're such different stories to me, you know, even though that was also written as a war story. You know, the Suzanne Collins stories are, you know, also stories about war, and she always writes from themes, and they've become very different kinds of themes. You know, like, the one I'm working on now is a very different kind of a story and about different kinds of loss. And the games are also very different, and the narratives are different, and the characters are so different. And the government systems are completely different, you know?
"The Long Walk" for me was - what I always loved about it was really that in a competition where you think everybody would be at each other's throats, it's the opposite - that you have this camaraderie and this brotherhood and this support system that I just found so beautiful and so hopeful and what made it singular.
RASCOE: That's Francis Lawrence. His movie "The Long Walk" opens in theaters this coming Friday. Thank you so much for speaking with us.
LAWRENCE: Thank you very much. Thanks for having me.
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