Lionsgate debuted the first trailer today for The Long Walk, an upcoming survival thriller directed by Hunger Games franchise veteran Francis Lawrence and based on the first novel written by Stephen King (under his then-pseudonym Richard Bachman).
The Long Walk is set in a dystopian near-future where a group of young men join a competition to walk as far as they can for as long as they can without stopping. The last one standing wins. What about the ones who can’t keep walking? Two warnings are given; the final one is a bullet. No matter the pain, no matter how grueling the journey, you walk or you die.
Watch the first trailer for The Long Walk below:
The film stars Cooper Hoffman (Licorice Pizza) as Raymond Garraty and David Jonsson (Alien: Romulus) as Peter McVries, while Mark Hamill goes to the dark side as the sinister Major, leader of the competition’s military escort. Hoffman is the son of the late Philip Seymour Hoffman, who Lawrence directed in three Hunger Games films.
Here’s what Francis Lawrence told me this week about bringing The Long Walk – which the director calls “one of my favorite, if not my favorite, Stephen King book” – to the big screen. (This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.)
From The Hunger Games to The Long Walk
Francis Lawrence: I think what I really loved, and especially because this is way pre-Hunger Games, was I love the conceit. I think part of it is just the idea of walk at a certain pace and how long can you go without dipping below that speed, and what do you do when you need to eat, when you need to drink, when you need to go to the bathroom, and in the middle of the night when you’re getting tired and dozing off and all of that. I think when you have that kind of a conceit, you get the audience to imagine themselves in the character’s shoes, no pun intended, to really try and imagine themselves what it would be like and whether or not they could do it.
The thing that I really love and loved from the very beginning, and that’s the thing that I think this movie is really about, is the relationships between all these young men. And it’s one thing that really differentiates from The Hunger Games. Of course, there’s relationships that are formed in those movies too, but this one is really about the camaraderie of these boys, and that’s the heart and soul of the story of the core ensemble, but really of McVries and Garraty, the sort of two leads of the movie. And it was that that really, really sold me because they felt like real grounded, authentic young men. Stephen King wrote this when he was very, very young, but those relationships and that dialogue still holds up today. I think it’s so timeless and the relationships are timeless. I just found it to be a really beautiful story, which is a weird thing to say with how intense it is and how violence it is. I think it actually is quite beautiful because of the relationships.
How Difficult Is it to Shoot a Movie That’s All Walking All the Time?
Francis Lawrence: We shot this movie chronologically and that’s not something that I’ve ever gotten to do. There’s just no movie that’s been built in a way that sort of afforded me that opportunity. But because of the nature of this movie, these young men gather, they all meet each other, and once they start walking, every day, the location changes and you’re in a new scene. And so we could choose chronologically, and I did worry a little bit in the very beginning about how I shoot these guys, how I block them, how do you shoot them walking, talking, doing all these things. And what I realized that the important thing is in this, again, is the camaraderie, as it’s the heart of the story. … I have to really focus on the characters and what the characters are going through physically, psychologically, emotionally with one another, seeing the degradation over time and over days and after nights and when the group’s whittling away.
Another thing that also helps is the change of locations [and] what is the kind of weather of the day, which is something that we are very much sort of at the whim of. If a scene was written as a rainy scene but we show up and it’s 100 degrees out, it now turns into a scene about sweltering heat. And that’s another thing that happens in these sequences. So, you have this variety: it could be early foggy morning, it could be raining, it could be 100 degrees, there could be bugs. There’s all these different things that are happening and that make each of the sort of scenes and sequences have different emotional values. And that’s really what I focused on, as opposed to just trying to get fancy with how do I shoot them walking.
I wanted to be really anchored with the boys, and that meant that we were always moving with them. So, there’s very few shots. There’s some sort of establishers that are sort of long lens shots from a distance, but usually we are right there in with the boys moving along with them three miles an hour down stretches of highways and roads and things like that. So, when you’re doing that and you’re really in the mix, there truly is really only a handful of angles that you can use to convey what we want to convey.
Walk a Mile (or 350) in My Shoes
Francis Lawrence: Physically, it took a toll. I think somebody clocked in that, in the movie, they walk like 336 miles over 4 or 5 days or something, and we walked probably close to 350 miles making the movie. I will say I think that was good for the actors and they really embraced it. But what was fascinating, and this actually really mirrors the characters, these are young men and with not fully formed frontal cortexes, right?
So, they come in like, “Oh, this is going to be great. We’re all going to do this movie where we’re walking, and then we love these characters,” and they’re all gung ho, just like all the guys are at the beginning of the movie and the gun goes off, they start walking and a week into it, they’re all like, “What the fuck have we gotten ourselves into?”
We’re walking three quarters of a mile for every take in certain scenes, and then going back to one and doing it again and doing it all day, and there were blisters and sunburns and people had to learn how to wrap their feet. But when you see some people limping, it was because they were wiped out and people lost weight, and it was pretty incredible.
Casting Star Wars Hero Mark Hamill as a Stephen King Villain
Francis Lawrence: I’ve been a fan since I was a kid. I mean, I saw Star Wars when I was seven, and so that was just a huge movie for me. I think anybody in my generation is just so changed by witnessing the Star Wars movies. So, he’s an icon and a legend, but I will say it was the later ones. It was the J.J. [Abrams] Star Wars where I saw him and I hadn’t seen him in so long, and there was just this kind of weariness to him and a gravitas to him that, quite honestly, I didn’t know he really had.
But I did also know that he had done a ton of voice work, and I don’t think a lot of people really know how much voice work he’s done. And he has real command over dialect and the kind of tone and the timbre of his voice and things like that. And I thought, “God, you know, there’d be something really interesting about him playing this part.” Because I didn’t want to go down the route where you get some real military guy, usually a military consultant and just sounds official. And I wanted somebody, again, with more complexity that just had kind of a weariness to him, but with gravitas.
He and I had a great Zoom [chat] and discovered that he had, as a kid, moved around from military base to military base with his family, and he knew these guys, these types of guys, and so he could just kind of go into this kind of mishmash of various people he had met over the years as a child and kind of conjured up his version of the Major. But it was just fantastic to work with him. But I think it was really him in J.J.’s movie [that] sort of shifted my view of the kinds of roles that he could play.
The Long Walk opens in theaters on September 12th.
