Josh Boone, the director of THE FAULT IN OUR STARS who is working on the stalled THE STAND feature, as well as REVIVAL, another Stephen King adaptation sat down with Nightmare Magazine for an interview, during which they touched on the progress of both his King flicks.
Regarding THE STAND, he candidly explained why the project hasn't been moving forward quite as quickly as people might like:
We’re working on it. The reason THE STAND hasn’t been made yet is because it’s expensive. It’s a problem of perception, I think. We really are attempting to revive the idea of the elevated horror film—movies like THE EXORCIST, ROSEMARY'S BABY, THE SHINING – A-list films with A-list casts. The 1980s really killed this idea because studios realized you could make horror films for dirt cheap and make a killing.
In theory, every studio wants to make THE STAND It’s a bona fide American classic. It should be an event movie… I adapted the book and have King’s blessing. We got that awe-inspiring cast. But WB didn’t want to spend what it would actually cost to make the movie. To have a real conversation about making this film at a level that is appropriate for the book King wrote is an 85-to-100-million-dollar conversation, which from where I’m sitting sounds like a no-brainer considering the mind-numbing nonsense that studios spend 250 million on. Which brings me back to that perception problem. They look at THE STAND and wonder why they can’t make this post-apocalyptic horror movie for 35 million.
King and I were most excited and continue to be most excited about a single three hour event movie: The GODFATHER of post-apocalyptic movies.
He went on to say that his "hope is that we’ll go make that movie with Lionsgate." My hope is that it gets made at all, because it sounds like he's really taking things seriously. In fact, he went into a little detail about his plans for converting the massive tome into a single movie, and it sounds very intriguing:
My adaptation is incredibly faithful to King’s book but the way I was able to contain all of it in a single three hour film is: I shattered King’s structure and told the story non-linear. That was really what broke everything open for me.
The opening scene is Mother Abagail on her deathbed sending our heroes off to make their stand against the Dark Man in Vegas and then we jump back in time and you basically have three spinning timelines going the whole movie—Captain Trips, Boulder, and The Stand, same as the book, but they are all happening simultaneously.
Sequences that fall hundreds of pages apart in the book stand side by side in the film, echoing and resonating in new and strange ways. I remain incredibly excited about that script. I can’t wait to make it. THE STAND is the movie of a lifetime, so I’m completely content waiting until someone gives us exactly what we need to do it right rather than to compromise.
While that quote was of a length worthy of THE STAND itself, his comments on REVIVAL were much briefer:
That one is ready to go… I wrote it on spec and we are putting together the financing now. Very exciting. I think it’s one of King’s very best books.
Now, many might disagree that REVIVAL is one of King's best, but the fact that we're getting something out of this Stephen King fan's hard work is certainly encouraging. It will be especially satisfying if those rumors pan out that Samuel L. Jackson will be joining the cast…
You can read the full interview RIGHT HERE!