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Director Josh Boone talks THE STAND

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Ever read The Stand? It’s a Stephen King novel, and considered to be one of his very best works of fiction. It’s about good vs evil, with a ton of post-apocalyptic subtlty caught in the middle. A pretty grim film then, one which has failed to really get the movie deail that it deserves. So what makes Josh “The Fault In Our Stars” Boone the man for the job? A ton of passion apparently.

The stand (2)

 

Speaking to Collider, Boone explained that The Stand was one of his dream projects, and that he was planning a “three hour version with an A-List cast across the board”:

I mean it’s amazing. I finished writing the script maybe a month ago. Stephen [King] absolutely loved it.  It’s, I think, the first script ever approved by him.  [It’ll be] a single version movie of The Stand. Three hours. It hews very closely to the novel.  It was such an amazing process.  I’m so familiar with [King’s] work and I’ve read so many of his books so many times over the years that it was just a really comfortable thing to be able to work with his material.  He gives you so much great material to work with.  There’s an abundance of it.  So it’s not a book where you have to generate new material and make it work for a movie.  He writes so cinematically and his characters are so sharply drawn.  You don’t have to change much.  [You use] a lot of structural things to condense a thousand pages into a three-hour movie but it’s still at heart his material.  I just made it work within the confines of what a single film can be.

Even at three hours in proposed running length, The Stand is going to need to cut some material, as Boone explained that he had to keep the core of the film intact:

I just focused on the things that I felt strongly about, that I have strong memories about, that are evocative to me even when I read it now.  You just have an internal interest meter.  The Stand is about so many things — you could make ten to fifteen different movies and focus on a different aspect of it.  I just focussed on the things that were more important to me and felt essential to me and were based in the characters.

So when does shooting begin? Soon, says Boone. In Hollywood time that is:

It takes a long time to prep a film like that.  Six to eight months.  I don’t imagine we would shoot the movie until next Spring at the earliest.  And we’re still early in the process.  I’m still meeting actors and having budget meetings and all that.

Previous Boone films have had a touch of nihilism, while The Stand is the kind of book that touches on more spiritual matters. A contrast of subjects, that has become a challenge for Boone to adapt:

I grew up in a very religious household. When I was about ten or eleven my parents became… I had always gone to church growing up but it was never the center of our lives; but when I was ten or eleven my parents became very hardcore Born Again Christians who believed in The Rapture and demons and the devil.  That became so oppressive that I turned against it.  I’m now probably an agnostic on a good day and an atheist on a bad day.  But I still remember all that stuff when I was a child and I still think there’s powerful things you can learn from any religion or any great teacher like Jesus or whoever.  It all applies so well to stories.  I appreciate anything that can be utilized to help tell a story more effectively.

Last Updated: September 11, 2014

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