Stephen King fans may be grateful that rarely a year goes by without an adaptation of his work being produced and distributed, but the world is still waiting for Hollywood to make a true live-action version of the author’s magnum opera: the dark tower series. The film released in 2017 is an insult to King’s epic creation, using only excerpts from the books and altering essential details, and, as a result, there is an intense hunger to see the material achieve cinematic justice.
One person who could almost certainly do this thing justice is writer / director Mike Flanagan, whose filmography includes Gerald’s game Yes doctor’s sleep – and his recent description of his vision for the show is likely to have fans praying to the gods of entertainment that one day he can realize what he calls his “dream project.”
IGN has published an excerpt from an interview that Flanagan talks about the dark tower, and his passion for the material spills out onto the screen. While continuing to work on other projects, such as his excellent new Netflix series. the midnight club, describes the Stephen King epic as having “a gravity of its own” that constantly draws him towards it. In his mind, he knows how his adaptation will begin and develop, and it’s about bringing the original text to life. Says the director,
What would it be like? It would look like books … It would be a black screen, and the words “The man in black fled across the desert, and the killer followed him” appeared in the silence, the wind blew and we sighed. it would gradually fade into this Lawrence of Arabia landscape with a distant silhouette making its way across the hard surface. And we would build it from there to the end.
First seen when Stephen King was still in college, the dark tower The series began with a series of five short stories published between 1978 and 1981, and in 1983 they were collected and published in a single book entitled The shooter. The story tells the journey of a Clint Eastwood-style hero named Roland Deschain as he makes his way to The Black Tower: a monolith that sits at the center of the universe.
The main book series comprises a total of seven novels: The shooter, The design of the three, the badlands, Wizard and Crystal, Creek Wolves, Susan’s songYes the dark tower – and Roland is joined on his mission by a heroin addict named Eddie Dean, a wealthy civil rights activist with dissociative identity disorder named Odetta Holmes, an eleven-year-old boy named Jake Chambers and a dog-like creature named oy.
Between the breadth of the source material and the complexity of the hybrid western / sci-fi / fantasy storytelling, it’s not too hard to see why Hollywood went to great lengths to make a faithful adaptation of the dark tower (In addition to the 2017 film, Amazon Prime Video tried and failed to turn it into a streaming series.) That said, Mike Flanagan says he knows everything:
It would just be about taking the coolest elements that it might be harder to connect with, especially where it gets pretty meta in between, and anchoring them, just by incorporating them. But otherwise the characters are what they are, the narrative arc is what it is, and I think the way not to do The Dark Tower is to try to do something else with it: try to do Star Wars or do The Lord of the Rings. . It is what it is; which is perfect. It’s as exciting as all that stuff and just as engaging.
Like all of Stephen King’s great books and adaptations, the key to the whole feat is in the characters. The extraordinary and ever-changing bond between Roland, Eddie, Odetta, Jake and Oy is at the heart of what he does the dark tower so powerful, amazing and moving, and Mike Flanagan knows that any successful live performance should reflect this:
This is the story of a small group of people and all the odds in the whole world are against them and they come together. As long as it is, it will be fine. There won’t be a dry eye in the house. Is it a series? Is it a feature film franchise? I don’t know, it’s all these things; it is neither the one nor the other. It would be my Everest doing it, but nothing would make me happier, and God, I hope there is a chance. I really do
Given Mike Flanagan’s background (the director has directed two of the best Stephen King films of all time based on two of the author’s hardest-to-adapt books), it’s hard to believe he’d do anything other than a perfect performance from the I live. from the dark tower. Two King-related projects have already been dissolved there, including one Sparkling prequel series and an adaptation of Renaissanceso all you avid readers should desperately cross your fingers that one day I will climb Everest.
For more information on Stephen King, you can discover the full history of film and TV adaptations with my weekly column on Stephen King adaptations and keep track of all projects in development with our guide to Stephen King’s upcoming movies and TV shows. King. Stephen King.
Source: Cinemablend
