In the early 1970s Stephen King He had a grim vision of the distant future: 2025. He envisioned a sharply divided society between haves and have-nots, in which the lower classes were passively controlled by a government-run gaming network and its flagship program, a televised competition in which participants had a chance to escape poverty by winning $1 billion – if they could survive being pursued by killers for 30 days.
This idea became running Manwhich King published under the pseudonym Richard Bachman in 1982. (Fun fact: One of the reasons fans realized King was the author was because he set part of the story in Derry, Maine, where This And other King stories occurs.) The original novel has a distinctly science-fiction flavor: at the time of publication, it is set in 2025, more than 40 years in the future. With Arnold Schwarzenegger's film, released just five years later, director Paul Michael Glazer followed suit, setting the story circa 2017, in a version of the future with rocket sleds and then-unprecedented video deepfakes. But when Shaun of the Dead writer and director Edgar Wright decided to re-adapt King's book, he knew he needed to take a different approach. After all, the distant future of 2025 has arrived.
“We wanted to make it seem like it was, if not the near future, then another future in a slightly alternate reality that's not that far from ours,” Wright tells Polygon.
Director of such conceptual classics as Hot fluff And Scott Pilgrim vs the World takes a slightly more grounded approach with running Manabandoning its usual fast-paced banter and impeccable needlepoint in favor of an R-rated dystopian action adventure that can be frustratingly entertaining at times.
Wright running Man full of artificial intelligence and fake news, surveillance systems and curious drones, Kardashian-style influencers and content creators spreading conspiracies. In other words, the year 2025 in this movie is very similar to the year 2025 in real life.
To uncover the many ways his new film reflects the wildly unprecedented times we live in today, Polygon spoke with Wright about the challenges of adapting King's original novel and the surprising way Terry Gilliam's 1985 sci-fi classic took it. Brazil inspired him, and how he taught his charming star, Top Shot: MaverickGlen Powell, who became “Bad Mood Glen”.
This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
Polygon: Stephen King running Man set decades in the future, Arnold Schwarzenegger's 1987 film is also science fiction. But your version is closer to me. There are elements of science fiction, but I kept thinking: It's like my life.
Edgar Wright: Well, I hope this isn't exactly your life. The original story takes place in 2025 and it's wild. It was published in 1982, but only the other day I learned from talking to Stephen that it was written in 1972. So the fact that he pulled 2025 out of thin air is pretty wild.
When creating the film, we wanted to create the feeling that this is, if not the near future, then another future in a somewhat alternative reality that is not so far from ours. So there's no technology in the movie that doesn't exist in one form or another, but technology has become more advanced in richer regions while everything else has regressed.
Also in a somewhat retro-futuristic style, we wanted to keep some of the analog technology as it was in the book. I always liked how in Terry Gilliam's film Brazilit's an 80's movie but it has a 40's style to it because George Orwell wrote 1984 in 1948. We thought the same thing: Well, if the original book was published in 1982, what if it was the 1982 2025 version? That's why you have VHS tapes, envelopes, magazines and mailboxes. Also, smartphones in movies are boring. So on a visual level, the fewer smartphones in films, the better.
There's a scene early in the film where Glen Powell walks from the slums where the story has so far taken place into the rich part of the city, and you suddenly realize that behind what initially looks like the security gate of an office building is an entirely separate city. How did you stage this scene to trick the audience and introduce them to this other world?
What I really remember from the book is how he leaves the apartment and goes to the Network building. I think this only happens in cities with a grid system. Clearly, people in Manhattan don't think about walking several city blocks. Oddly enough, in London people don't usually do this because there is no obvious route to take. But there's something really powerful about him walking towards a building. He doesn't use public transport – he may not be able to afford to use public transport. He just sneaks in there.
The first three scenes of the film, before the credits, take place in windowless rooms. It's very claustrophobic, and then suddenly we're outside and expanding the universe with all this world-building. The idea that there was actually a patrolled border in the upper part of the city was there from the very beginning. To capture this entire journey, we filmed in various locations in Glasgow and London over several weeks.
Glen Powell's character is defined by his anger. Was it difficult to get Glen, who usually plays such charming characters, to play this role?
This is also taken from the book, and in the book he is a much more evil person than in our film. We wanted Ben Richards to have a lot of righteous anger. It's good that he stands up to bullies and calls out injustice when he sees it. But, unfortunately, in this cruel future world he is punished for this. So he starts the movie as a very upset person because he is being punished for doing the right thing.
We talked about this when I was casting him in the film. I told Glen I wanted Glen in a bad mood. He's such a charming, funny, sweet person, I really enjoy seeing him lose his cool. In the film, he has a very short temper.
There is a line where Josh Brolin tells him before going on stage: “Your anger is your superpower. Use it.” So it's actually his character that makes him a prime candidate for the role running Man.
There is a recurring gag in the film where Richards records a message to be broadcast on television, and then the network edits him to say something else. In our current era AI-generated videos as political propagandathis seems especially timely.
It's straight out of the book. In the book, written in 1972, there is a scene where he is taped and his words are shown on television, edited to say something else. We just took the ball and ran with it. We started working on the script in early 2022. So even then there was an element of AI and deepfakes. But apparently it's gaining traction to the point where people believe deepfakes are being used as weapons to create fake news, post-truth, and everything else. So it's obviously very strong on the airwaves.
One of my favorite parts of the film is Daniel Ezra's character, the Apostle, who records and distributes hyper-stylized videos online about an in-universe conspiracy. How did you develop a visual language for this? Were you inspired by any real-life YouTube videos?
I don't remember watching anything in particular. Perhaps this is what I saw by osmosis.
It was a lot of fun filming these moments with Daniel Ezra. We decided that he was filming them in his apartment with a small green screen. This was actually one of the few moments in the film that didn't have a shot list. We kind of screwed it up. I wrote down the props I needed, but it was mostly just getting a lot of green paper pieces so you could break through something, or holding green card pieces, or dropping green card pieces, or pushing some green card away.
We improvised wildly and I'm not sure the crew was able to catch it. I think they were just wondering what the hell I was doing. I will say that editing these scenes probably took the longest time in the film.
Now that you're done running ManAre there any other Stephen King stories you'd like to adapt?
This is a very good question. I'd like an answer. I think everything I've read about it has already been made into a movie and I don't see the need to make a new version. So I don't know. I'll have to read all the stories I haven't read yet.
running Man hits theaters November 14th.
