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HOWARD: Akiva Goldsman first pitched it to me while we were making A Beautiful Mind and the rights weren’t available. JJ Abrams was working on it at first and then Akiva told me JJ was involved in so many projects he let it go. We started talking about what it could be. I read all the novels and we broke them down. He presented this idea to Stephen King, and this is insider material you might not get, but it was about introducing the Horn of Eld into the very first story. He knew it would allow us to use elements of the novels in a new combination that would give us the latitude to be true to the essence of the novels, but also re-balance and refocus the narrative in a cinematic way. That was the jumping-off point that began this process. When MRC and Modi Wiczyk became involved, that discussion deepened and we focused more on the Jake Chambers-Roland relationship at the very center of the first movie as a way of launching the universe. We simplified the story line, made it less expensive as a result, but we still utilized a lot of those important structural adjustments that Akiva and I had devised going back years ago. One of the things we did was put together a team of Dark Tower researchers, devotees of the books. We wanted to restructure the novels to be most cinematic and Stephen King agreed completely and understood the journey we were on immediately and supported it. We used this group to inspire our thinking and stay in the universe of Dark Tower.
Image (9) darktower_20110513200815_20110718230646__130516134710.jpg for post 500046
DEADLINE: And then you found Arcel.
HOWARD: Just about the time Akiva, Modi, Brian and I we were going to give up, Tom Rothman at Sony came aboard and that was an important turning point and that led to Nik. He grew up on the books and always loved them. He really was a great choice to approach the story in the most humanistic and cool way, focusing a lot on the Jake-Roland relationship. He understood the importance of that and connected with both characters. He’s also a strong original filmmaker with great taste. He and his writing partner tackled a rewrite and Nic has done a terrific job staging it.
GRAZER: We’ve definitely been working on it at least 10 years, but we found the perfect way to make it. It’s economical, and forced us to focus on the scenes that were the heartbeat of the story. It’s still a big landscape, but the scenes are more bull’s-eye than maybe it was back then. And we have the hippest cast with Idris Elba and Matthew McConaughey. We never had that cast.
HOWARD: Akiva Goldsman and our Erica Huggins never gave up on it, and Stephen King was just so patient. We kept trying drafts, searching for collaborators. We finally got there with MRC’s Modi and Tom Rothman at Sony. Modi really got these books, and he characterizes himself as a Tower Head. Nik Arcel did a great job directing. We were very excited on that first day and we are very pleased with what we’re seeing. We’ve believed in this for so long.
Idris Elba The Dark Twoer 2-shot
DEADLINE: You flirted with several actors to play Roland Deschain, who’s depicted in King’s books as this white, blue-eyed gunslinger. Idris Elba was a surprise, based on how readers probably imagined their hero through seven novels and a novella.
HOWARD: Back then, we came close to making it with Javier Bardem at one point. I’ve always felt that the essence of Roland was not necessarily the carbon copy of Clint Eastwood, even though that was what they used as the model on a lot of the book covers. The existential Western hero, played by Clint in The Good, The Bad And The Ugly, and Hang ‘Em High and those Sergio Leone Westerns, that was what inspired young Stephen King to begin with. But I never felt it was necessarily a look as much as an essence. So did Stephen. In this iteration, when we began thinking about candidates, Idris just felt like a really exciting and dynamic possibility. Idris brings this crucial combination of coiled danger, quiet charisma, undercurrents of complexity and nobility, and a kind of timeless cool. These are the elemental qualities of Roland, in my mind, and I think Idris carries it incredibly well. Then there is McConaughey. I had always thought he would be a tremendous Walter.
Matthew McConaughey Dark Tower 2-shot
Getty Images/Signet
DEADLINE: The Man in Black.
HOWARD: I worked with him once and long have been a fan since he emerged on the scene. So is Akiva, who wrote the script for A Time To Kill. He and I always believed Matthew would be a great trip and it was a dream come true when he said yes. He brings that combination of diabolical amorality mixed with an intelligence and his own logic that he adheres to, relentlessly. And a kind of wry wit that kept readers and will keep the movie audience off balance in a very entertaining way. You never know what to expect next from the Walter character. Matthew mixes that with an undercurrent of impending violence and danger, in a very watchable way.
DEADLINE: The original plan was so ambitious, with three movies and a TV series interspersed between. How has that evolved?
HOWARD: It hasn’t, really. We’re developing the television part, now. We don’t know what platform it will be on at this point, but we’re developing the content in hopes for more movies that will cover the epic and the characters involved.
King's Dark Tower when the first movie (in an anticipated series) hits movie theaters in February. Based loosely on The Gunslinger, the first book in King's seven-part saga, The Dark Tower will introduce Roland (Idris Elba), and start the ball rolling on what should be a lengthy franchise for Sony Pictures. Ron Howard as been part of the development on Dark Tower for ages, trying every which way to bring it to the big screen, so when I sat across from Howard in Italy on behalf of Inferno, I had to ask him if he still hoped to slip behind the camera for a Dark Tower chapter down the line. He tells me:
Ron Howard plays the dutiful role of executive producer in that response, heaping praise on current The Dark Tower director Nikolaj Arcel (The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo) but keeping the door open. He confirms the rumor that a sequel to The Dark Tower could shift from movie theaters to a television partner. (The rumor suggests that the TV side might tell the story shared in Stephen King's Wizards And Glassbook.) But it's the final bit of the conversation that has me believing that Ron Howard ABSOLUTELY still wants to direct a chapter of this saga.
As he says "I've stayed with that project all of these years for a real reason," and I don't believe that reason was to watch other people bring the story of Roland the Gunslinger to the big screen. We don't know specifically how Sony plans to adapt King's Dark Tower saga. All indications say this upcoming movie isn't a traditional interpretation, but possibly a sequel to the end of the last book that finds Roland embarking on his quest to reach the Tower one last time.
The adaptation of Stephen King's books will shift from February to summer
A film version of Stephen King’s apocalyptic saga was originally set for release on Feb. 17, but now will shift to the summer of 2017, sources close to the film tell EW.
The movie stars Idris Elba as Roland the Gunslinger and Matthew McConaughey as a sorcerer known as the Man in Black, both of whom are on a quest to reach the mystical tower that stands at the nexus of countless dimensions.
Principal photography for the Nikolaj Arcel-directed film wrapped on schedule in late July, but the plan to have a completed film ready to screen six months later proved to be overly ambitious. Now, Sony Pictures and production company MRC have decided post-production can’t be finished in that timeframe and are about to inform theater owners of the change.
A trailer leak last month featured mostly rough visual effects, and the filmmakers have discovered that the aggressive February timeline isn’t enough time to get the sci-fi/fantasy epic into shape, given its financial constraints. The film has a surprisingly low cost of about $60 million, and the choice was either to add millions more to the budget to speed up the work, or push to a later date. “It’s a very fiscally responsible budget, and trying to stay in budget to make money and stay profitable means the VFX won’t be finished in time [for February],” one source tells EW, on condition of anonymity. “Now that there’s more time, they’re not paying rush charges to get the effects where they need to be.”
This also will allow more time to publicize the movie, which hopes to become a multi-film franchise, with a spin-off TV show already in the works.
Only four months from release, there’s still no trailer. And the film recently dropped out of EW’s PopFest a week before the fan gathering, with the studio indicating the footage set to be previewed wasn’t ready. Ever since, fans have been speculating that the movie might be wavering on its February target.
A new release date wasn’t available, the sources said, because a new weekend hasn’t been selected yet. A formal announcement is expected as soon as that’s settled.
Sony and MRC did not immediately return requests for comment.
The story of The Dark Tower, which King has unspooled over seven novels, a handful of short stories, and even a comic book series, is a mix of gunplay and magic, a fusion of genres ranging from science fiction and horror to Westerns and Tolkien-esque fantasy.
Mounting a film adaptation has been almost as epic a quest, with J.J. Abrams attempting a version years ago, then Ron Howard, who nearly got the greenlight before it proved to be too costly a gamble for most studios. With Arcel (best known for the Danish film A Royal Affair) at the helm, Howard has stepped back to produce.
King is not directly involved but has served as an unofficial consultant on the project. Screenwriter Akiva Goldsman, who won the Oscar for A Beautiful Mind, wrote the script with Arcel and co-writer Anders Thomas Jensen.
Fans of the novels can take heart that the film has been shot and is definitely still moving forward. The destination, much like the Tower in the story, has just turned out to be further off than anyone realized.
I like Guardians of the Galaxy, but what I saw was “It’s successful, and now we’ve got room to make a colorful part for another big-name actor.” I’d feel like an amendment. The Dark Tower script was well written, I like the director and his take on it, and I can be the creator, the author of the Man in Black—a.k.a. the Devil—in my version of this Stephen King novel.
We’ve done the first one. It’s a fantastic thriller that takes place in another realm, an alternate universe, but it’s very much grounded. For instance, the gunslinger’s weapon isn’t a lightsaber or something; it’s a pistol. I enjoyed approaching my character as if I were the Devil having a good time, getting turned on by exposing human hypocrisies wherever he finds them.
The same is true of the movie. It just moved back another week, to Aug. 4.
“The first episode of a show has been written, and we hope to retain Ron’s original idea to mix platforms, something that seemed revolutionary 10 years ago but now is something that others have done,” Goldsman said. “Idris for sure is part of this, and if the movie is Roland Deschain the gunslinger, the show is his origin story, based on the fourth novel in the series, Wizard and Glass.”
http://deadline.com/2017/07/akiva-goldsman-tom-clancy-rainbow-six-ologies-avengelyne-paramount-1202126928/
“It never seemed likely to me that someone would come along and want to make a film out of it,” King continues. “There were things from time to time, when people would talk about the possibility, but I never took it seriously.” The Dark Tower’s journey from page to screen has certainly been a colourful one, with J.J. Abrams attempting to adapt it alongside Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse as far back as 2007. Ron Howard and Akiva Goldsman came on board in 2010, casting Javier Bardem as gunslinger Roland Deschain and planning to deliver three films with two television series sandwiched between. “I liked that idea,” King tells Empire. “Everybody did.”
Though Ron Howard eventually moved on, his replacement – first-time director Nikolaj Arcel (screenwriter for the Swedish version of The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo) – set about tackling Goldsman’s draft. “I like Akiva Goldsman as a writer very much,” says King. “[Akiva] said, ‘Why don’t we start in media res, in the middle of the story?’ Akiva’s idea and Nic’s idea, was to say, ‘Maybe this is the second time around for Roland Deschain…’”
After 10 years of in-production limbo, it was only “two years ago” when King started to actually believe this film would hit the big screen. Remarkably, The Dark Tower pops the author’s producing cherry, also gifted casting approval over an ensemble headed by Idris Elba (“in the books, it’s never said that Roland Deschain is a Caucasian person”) and Matthew McConaughey (“to me, he was always Walter, pretty much the way I’d imagined him. When people fall back from him in fear, you understand why”).
According to King, The Dark Tower “is something completely new that melds the Western with fantasy. This is a risky project. It’s not backed up by a bunch of comic books. [It's] scary. But I’m happy with what we’ve got.”
“As one of his ‘Constant Readers,’ one of the things I found so much pleasure in was the fact that when I read one novel and I read the next one, there was the same town, there was the same character, or there was Castle Rock. It blew my mind,” the filmmaker told EW during our set visit last summer. “I wanted to have that same feeling.”
But mixing dimensions is easy compared to acquiring film rights from competing studios, so he had a difficult road of clearances ahead. But … he did it.
“I wanted Paul Sheldon’s book Misery’s Child in one of the shots. I wanted one of the old haunted places to be Pennywise’s house. And I got all that. It’s just like a dream come true for me, mixing every single thing. Cujo’s going to walk by. It’s just fun.”
During a guest appearance on the Happy Sad Confused Podcast for his new documentary Pavarotti, Howard admitted that yeah, the movie really should have leaned into the source story’s horror content. He also learned, a little too late, that a focus on The Gunslinger himself, instead of his kid sidekick counterpart, would have been a better approach:
Howard admitted another error in planning, suggesting that a TV-first approach would have been a better way to conjure up interest in the sprawling franchise from the general audience: