radewart wrote:

TalkOnCorners wrote:I wonder if that report from the LA Leakers that King and Boone want McConaughey and Bale for the leads ever panned out.

McConaughey as Randall Flagg would truly be awesome. Who would Bale play? Stuart?

Josh Boone ‏@JoshBooneMovies

I have always wanted McConaughey as Stu and Bale as Flagg. Still not sure how that story leaked - just not true.

ItsJustMe wrote:Josh Boone wants McConaughey to play Stu and Bale to play Flagg.

Josh Boone ‏@JoshBooneMovies

I have always wanted McConaughey as Stu and Bale as Flagg. Still not sure how that story leaked - just not true.

m4st4 wrote:

ItsJustMe wrote:Josh Boone wants McConaughey to play Stu and Bale to play Flagg.

Josh Boone ‏@JoshBooneMovies

I have always wanted McConaughey as Stu and Bale as Flagg. Still not sure how that story leaked - just not true.

The story that leaked was the other way round or?

m4st4 wrote:

ItsJustMe wrote:Josh Boone wants McConaughey to play Stu and Bale to play Flagg.

Josh Boone ‏@JoshBooneMovies

I have always wanted McConaughey as Stu and Bale as Flagg. Still not sure how that story leaked - just not true.

The story that leaked was the other way round or?

“I finished writing the script maybe a month ago,” says Boone. “Stephen [King] absolutely loved it. It’s, I think, the first script ever approved by him. [It'll be] a single version movie of The Stand, three hours, [and] it hews very closely to the novel.”

“It’s not a book where you have to generate new material and make it work for a movie. He writes so cinematically and his characters are so sharply drawn, you don’t have to change much… I just made it work within the confines of what a single film can be.”

Naturally that involves plenty of cuts, although as a huge fan of King’s work, Boone felt confident in selecting what was and wasn’t important for the movie…

“The Stand is about so many things - you could make ten to fifteen different movies and focus on a different aspect of it… I just focused on the things that I felt strongly about, that I have strong memories about, that are evocative to me even when I read it now.”

So when can we expect cameras to begin rolling? Well, not for a little while yet, but a start date is at least in sight…

“It takes a long time to prep a film like that,” says Boone. “Six to eight months. I don’t imagine we would shoot the movie until next spring at the earliest, and we’re still early in the process. I’m still meeting actors and having budget meetings and all that.”

Still a way to go then, but given the amount of false starts this project has suffered, it’s just exciting to hear that things are finally happening…

“I think that his take is terrific — and don’t count on it being one film,” Stephen King told MTV. “There’s talk about doing it in an entirely different and innovative way, and I don’t want to go into it because that’s Josh’s baby.”

[Those early versions] were not so much where I thought they should be going with it. [They were] much more like a big summer blockbuster. When I thought about The Stand it’s so much about the vast network of characters, and all their problems. It’s kind of a morality play set in post-apocalyptic America. The battle between good and evil is the battle for these peoples’ souls. They make choices which dictate the fate of humanity.

I really wanted to do an A-list actor, really grounded, credible version of the movie. I sold them on that and they hired me…I sold them on a single, three hour movie. I went and got [Stephen] King sold on it, everybody’s really excited…I told the story non-linear and that was the way I was able to compress that book and get everything into that script. You open with Mother Abigail dying and sending the guys off, and then you jump back in time… So what happened is the script gets finished, I write it in like five months, everybody loves it, King loves it, $87 million is what it was budgeted at, really expensive for a horror drama that doesn’t have set pieces.

They came back and said “would you do it as multiple films?” and I said “fuck yes!” I loved my script, and I was willing to drop it in an instant because you’re able to do an even truer version that way. So I think we are going to do like four movies. I can’t tell you anything about how we’re going to do them, or what’s going to be in which movie. I’ll just say we are going to do four movies, and we’re going to do THE STAND at the highest level you can do it at, with a cast that’s going to blow people’s minds. We’ve already been talking to lots of people, and have people on board in certain roles that people don’t know about. We’re looking to go into production next year, maybe in the spring.