bewilderingly batshit, so creatively complex
that it seemed unfilmable. And King himself
seemed to be happy with that. “It never seemed
likely to me that someone would come along
and want to make a film out of it,” he says.
“There were things from time to time, when
people would talk about the possibility, but
I never took it seriously.”
However, in a post-Lord Of The Rings
world, it seemed that unfilmable was a thing
of the past, like leaving your doors unlocked
at night or using Myspace. And with the novels
complete as of 2004 (bar a prequel, The Wind
Through The Keyhole, published in 2012), The
Dark Tower was fair game. “Every studio is
looking for a tentpole project where it’s possible
to not only do a movie, but to do a series of
movies,” adds King. “And the creative people
were able to say, ‘This is something entirely new
that melds the Western with fantasy — let’s go
out there and see if we can make this happen.’
And finally someone did.”
The result is this month’s The Dark Tower,
which sees Matthew McConaughey flee across
the desert, and Idris Elba follow. But before we
got to this point, the wheel had a few turns left
in it...
J.J. ABRAMS was the first to attempt
to scale the tower, when his Lost alums Damon
Lindelof and Carlton Cuse optioned the rights
to the series from King in 2007. After grappling
with a proposed trilogy (“It does need room to
breathe,” agrees King) for three years, the option
expired and Abrams moved on. Awakening the
Force? A cinch. Adapting over 4,000 pages of
King? Not so much.
Enter Ron Howard and Akiva Goldsman,
who came on board to direct, produce and write
in 2010, along with big-budget backing from
Universal and a plan so cunning it could win
a battle of riddles with a homicidal train
(a scenario that takes place in the third Dark
Tower book, The Waste Lands). Their version
would comprise three films with two television
series sandwiched in-between, and Javier Bardem
was on board as Roland. “I liked that idea,” says
King. “Everybody did. Turned out he had a bad
back, at that time anyway. That made it a little
iffy with him.”
With Bardem backing out, Universal soon
joined him in 2011 and The Dark Tower fell back
into limbo. It was never entirely dead, though.
“I started to think maybe two years ago that it
really would happen,” King says. “Modi
[Wiczyk, co-CEO of MRC] came along and got
really interested in it. They started to spend
serious money.”
With Sony Pictures also on board, this new
version of the story gained momentum quickly.
However, with Howard deciding only to remain
on board as a producer, it needed a director, and
fast. “I’ve been one of Stephen King’s Constant
Readers since I was a teenager in Denmark,” says
Nikolaj Arcel, whose biggest gig prior to this was
writing the screenplay for the Swedish version of
The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo. “I know how
vast the story is. It’s in my blood.”AT FIRST glance, The Dark Tower is
a straight-up adaptation of The Gunslinger, in
which Roland’s thirst for vengeance against man
in black Walter Padick (for standard man-in-
black stuff: murder, theft, that sort of thing) is
complicated by the appearance of Jake
Chambers (Tom Taylor), a young telepath who
has come to Mid-World from our own modern-
day New York. At one point, The Gunslinger was
the movie’s official subtitle. And it even starts
with the line, “The man in black fled across the
desert and the gunslinger followed.”
But when Arcel, along with writing partner
Anders Thomas Jensen, set to work on the
existing Akiva Goldsman draft, he had to face
an unexpected obstacle. Namely, that The
Gunslinger is actually a bit of a slog. It’s a dense,
and somewhat trippy, novel, heavily inspired by
Robert Browning’s epic poem Childe Roland To
The Dark Tower Came. It’s still got moments of
dark King magic, but otherwise it’s the literary
equivalent of the first season of Parks And
Recreation, the one you have to wade through toRoland Deschain — the
gunslinger (Idris Elba) —
slings one of his mighty guns.
Below left: Roland and
Walter Padick — the man in
black (Matthew
McConaughey) — face off.
Bottom left: Roland’s
apprentice Jake Chambers
(Tom Taylor).�