Glen Powell is the star of the latest adaptation of Stephen King’s novel The Running Man.
The author “isn’t shy about his opinions,” as one director put it. But he gives filmmakers a wide berth and they have to decide what to put onscreen.
If you want to adapt one of Stephen King’s many books into a movie, you’ll have to get his approval. But don’t worry. The former teacher turned star novelist is rather lenient.
“A lot of times, I will approve a screenwriter, and it’s almost like sending a kid off to college,” King said by phone, laughing. “You hope that everything’s going to work and that they’re going to be good students and not get hurt or wind up in rehab.”
King has sent three of his “children” off to the big screen this year: The Life of Chuck, from director Mike Flanagan; The Long Walk, from Francis Lawrence; and The Running Man, from Edgar Wright.
“Steve is certainly involved in approving the script and the cast, and he isn’t shy about his opinions, but beyond that, he truly does give you space and freedom,” said Flanagan, who has turned several of King’s books into films.
Over the years, King has been vocal about his dislike of Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 rendering of The Shining. But there are plenty of adaptations of his work that he’s fond of. The Shawshank Redemption (1994), The Green Mile (1999) and the series The Institute (2025) are among them.
King even thinks Misery (1990) is a better movie than it was a book. “The combination of Kathy Bates and James Caan was magic,” he said. “And it had a touch of humour in it that was really missing from the book.”
Other books of his that he would like to see adapted include Rose Madder and From a Buick 8.
Although he firmly believes that the movies and books are separate entities, King said he’s puzzled when the screen version deviates too much from the source material. “My idea is, go ahead, bend it and shape it the way that you want it. But if you bought a book to do, you would think that you would want to do that book rather than some other idea,” King said.
“He has a way with language that is inherently cinematic and lends itself to creating these flights of imagination in his readers,” Flanagan said. “He gives you the ingredients you need to paint the world as he sees it. That’s a wonderful gift to a film-maker.”
Flanagan and four other directors talked about their experience translating King’s words into compelling film iterations.
Even as a teenager, Wright realised how wildly different the 1987 version of The Running Man was from King’s 1982 novel (released under the pseudonym Richard Bachman). In making his own version of the story of Ben Richards (Glen Powell), a contestant who must survive being hunted for 30 days to win a large sum of money in a dystopian reality, Wright focused on preserving the text’s subjective perspective.
“You don’t see anything or hear anything that he can’t see or hear. That’s how the book is written,” he said.
Wright recalled a nerve-wracking weekend when King read the screenplay, sending feedback on each page via email.
“My heart couldn’t take it after a while, and I was like, ‘Please read the whole thing.’” Given King’s stature, Wright laughed as he described the experience as “handing in your homework to the world’s most famous English teacher”.
It also wasn’t lost on the director that the timely logline for the book warns that “in the year 2025, the best men don’t run for president, they run for their lives”.
“King has been Nostradamus quite a few times in his work,” Wright said, “and you wish it wasn’t the case, but it’s sobering how prophetic it is.”
In collaboration with screenwriter JT Mollner, Lawrence zeroed in on the elements of The Long Walk, about a group of boys who must walk nonstop to win a deadly contest, that he thought would make his adaptation relevant today. The book, released under the Bachman pseudonym in 1979, was an allegory for the Vietnam War, Lawrence said. “But we leaned into the idea of financial nihilism, the loss of the American dream, and how everywhere in the world people are having a really hard time making enough money to put food on the table and a roof over their head.”
With King’s support, the film-makers aged the characters and modified the ending. One small but notable change involved the speed at which the boys walk. On the page, King notes that it’s 4 mph (6.5km/h), but Lawrence said that in reality, that would be too fast and reduced it to 3 mph (5km/h).
“You could walk backwards at 3; you could go uphill at 3,” he said. “You could probably doze off and your body would keep walking in 3.”
And though King rarely exercises his approval in a restrictive manner, he was adamant that The Long Walk be rated R so that the violence would not be trivialised.
To Flanagan, King is so effective because he understands the characters and how the horrors in his stories derived directly from them. “Too many people focus on the wrong elements when they approach his work for adaptation,” the director said.
His process, he explained, is to keep the humanism front and centre and not get distracted by the horror. “The darkness in his stories works so well because he’s more focused on the light,” Flanagan added.
The director said The Life of Chuck, which traces key moments in the history of the title character using a fantastical end-of-the-world framework, illustrated King’s intent throughout his work.
“It seems to be a story about the end of all things, about a world dying around its baffled and helpless inhabitants,” he said. “But in King’s usual way, that’s where the magic trick happens: He’s not writing about death; he’s writing about life.”
Flanagan said King’s pleased reaction to this adaptation of his 2020 novella “has made me happier than any other feedback I’ve ever received in my career”.
As a teenager, film-maker Andy Muschietti had already read King’s 1986 novel, It, when he came across a 1990 TV adaptation and was not impressed. For his 2017 big-screen take on the story of children facing off against a malevolent entity, Muschietti aimed to do justice to the more shocking, R18 aspects of King’s text that couldn’t be shown on TV.
Muschietti also updated the look of the creature, keeping the essential traits (the silvery fabric of the costume, the orange hair) but jettisoning the mid-20th-century Bozo the Clown look. The director had always been captivated by how enigmatic It was about the origin of the terrifying monster and its intentions.
“King can be very granular and hand it to you on a tray, stimulating your imagination with description,” he said. “But he can also be very cryptic about things.”
Although Muschietti’s It stayed fairly faithful to the novel, he sought validation from the author, whom he referred to as “Uncle Steve,” for 2019’s It Chapter Two.
“I wanted to get his blessings on the second part because it contained more detours and creative licenses apart from the book than the first part did,” Muschietti said.
King’s 1983 tale of a man whose dead child returns to life was the first one that the novelist himself adapted into a screenplay, to be filmed in his native Maine.
“I had no intention of changing anything,” director Mary Lambert said of her 1989 film. “I was completely on board with bringing his novel to life in the most thoughtful and penetrating way that I could. That had to have endeared me to him, because I’m not sure that every director would feel that way.”
Lambert compared working with King to doing improv with actors, as he would build on her suggestions. Most of her ideas were visual and subtextual. For instance, she thought putting 17th-century New England-style portraits of dead children on the wall of one character’s childhood home would underscore the theme of grief. And it was Lambert’s idea to put King on screen as a priest, even though some of the producers thought his recognisable presence would pull viewers out of the story.
“I understood fandom from my years directing music videos,” she explained. “I said, ‘I don’t think you guys understand fandom. People want to see Stephen.’”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Carlos Aguilar
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