This article appears in the new issue of DEN OF GEEK magazine. You can read all of our magazine stories here.The Long Walk was Stephen King’s first completed novel, although it was not published until 1979 under the pseudonym Richard Bachman. An allegory about the Vietnam War, it’s set in a totalitarian future where in an annual contest, a hundred young men must walk until only one is left alive. The winner is promised untold riches. The rules are simple: walk or die. Several filmmakers have tried adapting the book over the years, but director Francis Lawrence—who tackled similar material via the Hunger Games franchise—has finally made it a reality.With a script by J.T. Mollner (Strange Darling) and starring Cooper Hoffman (Licorice Pizza) and David Jonsson (Alien: Romulus) as two contestants who become unlikely friends, Lawrence’s The Long Walk is faithful, chilling, and, as Lawrence himself notes, eerily timely.cnx.cmd.push(function() {cnx({playerId: "106e33c0-3911-473c-b599-b1426db57530",}).render("0270c398a82f44f49c23c16122516796");});This project was in development for years. How did the pieces finally come together for you?It was strange. It first crossed my desk in 2006. Akiva Goldsman, with whom I was doing I Am Legend, suggested it. I hadn’t heard of it, and he gave it to me and thought that I might like it and thought it would make a great movie. So I read it and I loved it. It became my favorite King book, but then when I said ‘yeah, let’s do it!,’ the rights had gotten nabbed up by Frank Darabont. Then over the next 19 or so years, I heard that it was almost happening, not happening, almost happening.In the meantime, I gave it to my younger son who was a big reader, and one day I was walking down the hallway of my house, saw his copy of the book sitting on a shelf, and just thought to myself, ‘God, I wonder what’s going on with The Long Walk?’ And that day, I got a call from Roy Lee, who produced the movie with me, saying, ‘Hey, would you be interested in doing The Long Walk? I’ve got the rights to it.’Were you struck by the parallels between this book and The Hunger Games?I was kind of aware. I had read The Long Walk before getting involved in Hunger Games, so it’s kind of impossible not to think of The Long Walk when you are working on something like The Hunger Games. But weirdly when I had the opportunity again to do The Long Walk, the things that made me want to do it were very different.The big one for me on The Long Walk, and what always stuck with me, was the camaraderie of the young men, their relationships and their dynamics, and the bonds that they form. I always thought that was the most beautiful thing about the story, as violent and as terrifying as it is. So when it came time to make The Long Walk, I knew some people would kind of lump it into a Hunger Games-like box, even though it precedes that in terms of ideas. But I made it for completely different reasons.All the actors are terrific, but Cooper and David are particularly amazing. How did you land on them?I had worked with his father [Philip Seymour Hoffman], and I’d seen Cooper in Licorice Pizza. So he was the first person in my mind that I thought would be a perfect Garraty. Luckily he was available and he was interested, so he and I met.David actually was not really on my radar. I think I’d only at the time seen maybe an episode or two of Industry. But he was in the first batch of guys who sent in self-tapes and he was maybe the third person in that first batch, and I saw him and I was like, ‘This guy has to be McVries.’ Watching his audition made me think this movie was going to work. Everything just suddenly clicked into place with his audition. Then I actually organized a chemistry read between [Hoffman and Jonsson] over Zoom, got the two of them to do a couple of scenes together, and it was very clear that they instantly had chemistry.What was it like to work with Mark Hamill on this and did you know at the time that he was also doing another King adaptation [The Life of Chuck]?I was not aware of Life of Chuck. I think he was done with it. Mark was actually an idea that I had just because I was trying to think outside the box. I think there are very clichéd ways of going with a character like that, and I didn’t want to do that. And honestly seeing him in some of the more recent Star Wars movies, there was this kind of weary, grizzled quality to him, plus I knew about all of his voice work.So I set up a meeting with him to chat about it and, quite honestly, he was a little wary of the movie. He’s not a huge fan of violence and all of that, but I think his sons specifically were like ‘you’ve got to do this.’ He also, I think, grew up in a military family and moved around to different bases, and he was like, “I feel like I know this person.” He got the voice and the accent and everything, and just dove right in. It was really fun to work with him. It’s also a trip at the same time just because I saw Star Wars when I was seven years old, so then to be working with him was pretty insane.What are your thoughts on meeting the political moment with this movie, which seems very relevant to where we’re at right now?What was interesting, and it was something that we worked on in the adaptation process and J.T. and I spoke a lot about, was the relevance that we could bring to it thematically. King wrote this so long ago when he was very young, and it was a story that was really about the Vietnam War and all these young men willing to go off to battle and die these horrible deaths. You’re never going to take that out of the movie, and I was not trying to take that out of the movie.But what I always loved about the book was the mystery of when does this exist and what’s happened, and why do they do the Walk? So we tried to bring in this sense of what started as maybe the loss of the American dream. Are you going to make enough money? Can you actually afford rent? Can you afford to buy a house? Can you afford to have kids? Can you put food on your table? That feels very relatable and very relevant, so that was important for us in terms of contemporizing some of the ideas, which are also timeless.Did you consult with Stephen King while making the movie?He had to approve me and J.T., all of that, which was fine. We had to share the script, which was probably the scariest moment because we had made some tweaks to certain things. He luckily liked it and approved it, which was great. Then we went and made the movie and when we felt like we were really pretty damn close to being at the finished product after some test screenings and things like that, we sent it to him and he had a really nice call with me and seemed to enjoy the movie very much.The Long Walk is in theaters on Sept. 12.The post The Long Walk Director Reveals How to Adapt Stephen King’s Scariest Dystopia for Today appeared first on Den of Geek.