The Running Man’s Edgar Wright on Changing Ending, Stephen King’s Response | Interview
ComingSoon’s Tyler Treese spoke with The Running Man director Edgar Wright about his high-octane action movie starring Glen Powell. Wright discussed the film’s changed ending from the book, reuniting with Michael Cera, and more. The Running Man is now available on Digital with over two and a half hours of bonus content.
“The Running Man is a fun, unhinged, deadly game show where contestants must survive 30 days while being hunted by professional assassins, with every move broadcast to a bloodthirsty public and each day bringing a greater cash reward. Working-class Ben Richards (Glen Powell) is coerced into the competition by the show’s ruthless producer (Josh Brolin). Ben’s defiance, instincts, and grit turn him into a fan favorite—and a threat to the entire system.”
Tyler Treese: Edgar, I wanted to ask you about the early portions of The Running Man because there are early scenes with Ben with his child and his wife that are so important to understanding his motivations. We don’t get a ton of time with them, but they manage to have an impact, and your films always have a surprising amount of heart to them, even when they’re subverting genres and expectations. So, can you speak to your approach for that first act and really establish that bond between those characters?
Edgar Wright: Yeah, it was actually some of the first scenes that we shot and some of the hardest scenes to do because we made the decision to use real babies, which makes it, hopefully, feel more real. We didn’t wanna go down the route of like CGI babies or dummies, but like having like two year olds kind of like on set, like, and sort of Jamie and Glen sort of acting around there crying, it was quite a kind of tall order. It was one of the most difficult scenes I think I’ve done in my career as difficult in its own way as some of the later action scenes.
But I think the other thing that we really wanted to you to feel in the opening scenes of the movie, like the first three scenes in the movie before the credits, is to feel kind of how claustrophobic the world is and that you are in these windowless rooms, like first in the kind of the factory office, then in this kind of lobby. Then, in their apartment, they’re in this co-op where there are no windows to the outside.
And so it just shows the existence that most, the majority of the population on the wrong side of the wealth gap are living in. That they’re basically either doing more than one job or like pulling down double, or in Jamie’s case, she’s about to consider doing a triple shift while she’s got like a young, sick child. Just the sort of their place in the universe and how kind of like and how this isn’t something that can keep happening.
Also, you establish that Ben’s character is out of work because he’s been blacklisted from the same corporation, owns everything, and he’s on the blacklist. It means that he can’t legally or safely work. So a lot of these things were in the book. The book starts with a very sort of claustrophobic scene that feels very desperate. And so we wanted to conjure the same kind of image that Ben feels like he has to put his boots on and make some money fast for the sake of his wife and child.
The Stephen King book was written in 1982...
Published in ’82, but written in ’73, I found out during production.
Wow. That’s even crazier because it feels like direct commentary on what we’re living today, and for it to be ‘73 that’s even more wild. Some of the fake TV shows. I’m just shocked that we don’t have a guy running in a hamster wheel doing trivia. That just seems like something we’d see on TV now. Was it weird how on the nose some of this stuff was? Even though it’s from the book, it just seems incredibly timely.
I think there are two things. One is that Stephen King is like Nostradamus to have predicted all of this stuff, and not just in this book, but also in other ones 50 years ago. But it’s also an even more sobering thought is how little has changed in those decades. One of the things that we wanted to do with the movie is make it feel like it was sort of retro futuristic as if it was an alternate 2025. If this is Stephen King’s idea of 2025, the year in which the book is set, that some of the things that you would’ve imagined then exist, and some technology has remained the same.
So we kind of took this approach of like, well, if in the uptown everything has become more advanced, and then the downtown areas, like everything else has gone to, or people are kind of using analog technology because it’s cheaper or because they can’t afford a smartphone, et cetera. So it is in a way like sort of like…. Yes, we’re in the year in which it was set, and the fiction part of the science fiction is fainter than ever. But I think that was something that we really wanted to embrace is showing that you can have a future dystopia that’s only five minutes into the future.
I love your leading man here, Glen Powell, and listening to him speak about film, he seems to really understand storytelling, and you can see that he has ambitions. He’s been doing some producing now. He co-wrote Hit Man. What stood out about Glen as a collaborator? Because he seems like someone who’s really invested in learning about all the ins and outs of making movies rather than just acting.
The most ambitious part of this film was sort of the schedule and just the intensity of it because we started filming just over a year ago, and obviously, Glen is in every single scene. I honestly don’t think I could have gotten through the movie without somebody as diligent and as hardworking as him. The mood of the whole film trickles down from the number one person on the call sheet.
I gotta say, Glen is probably the nicest, most responsible kind of actor you could ever hope to work with, and not just as an actor — he’s brilliant. He wasn’t a producer on this film, but he has also produced other things, and he’s written other things. Actually, for me and Michael [Bacall] having Glen around as a collaborator who’s also a great writer as well is really, really fantastic because he has really good ideas. There are some things in the movie that were ideas of his that he sort of suggested, something that me and MB would go write up.
But it was a great collaboration. I couldn’t say enough nice things about him. He’s sort of like the best person that you could hope to work with on something like this.
Scott Pilgrim is one of my favorite movies, so it was so exciting to see you and Michael Cera together again. His introduction to the film really gives it that extra jolt before we go into the final stretch. How is it just leaning into Michael’s strengths? Because people get excited when they see him. He adds energy, and then those moments are like Home Alone on steroids. It’s just an insane stretch. So, how is it just leaning into using him and really ratcheting it up for that scene?
Edgar Wright: Well, I think it was that, you know, the character is in the book and the action doesn’t play out in exactly the same way, but it was something that was there right from the first draft. And then it actually developed a little bit. One of the great script notes that we got during the development process from Mike Ireland, then-head of film at Paramount. He said this thing because Bradley, Daniel Ezra’s character, and Elton, Michael Cera’s character, were both people in the underground who helped Ben and Mike Ireland said, “One of these guys has gotta f— him over,” and it was like a great note.
Then we sort of decided we like, well, we don’t want Elton to be a baddie. We don’t want him to be kind of one of the baddies, but what if he was a massive liability? What if, actually, the thing that’s the obstacle is that the guy is kind of not quite on planet Earth? So, when it came to the idea of like, well, if he’s got this house booby-trapped and ready to go, even if they had the chance to escape, his first thought is not like, “Let’s get out of it.” First thought is like, “I gotta set off all my traps.”
So it was a really fun kind of energy to bring to that whole set piece because there’s a different version of it that if they were smart and sensible, they’d get outta there, and just go, but no, it doesn’t play out that way.
What’s cool about this digital release in the home release is that there’s a bunch of extra content, and you’re still doing commentary tracks. Can you just speak to your willingness to go into the art and speak on it? Commentary tracks I used to listen to repeatedly, like Shaun of the Dead and Scott Pilgrim, always left me feeling inspired and wanting to engage with the art, but they’re becoming increasingly rare. So what does it mean for you to get to open up and include them on this release?
Yeah, I’ve kept doing them. I think it’s because people, like you just said, it’s because responses like yours, people say that they really like them, and I think people would be really sad if there wasn’t one. I also think as well, even before I did Shaun of the Dead, you know, like film commentaries are like film school to people. There are lots of people who can’t afford to go to film school. You don’t have the option to go to film school, and DVD commentaries can teach you a great deal.
I always point to one when people say, “What’s a particularly inspiring one?” I always remember when I was about to make Shaun of the Dead, I listened to Robert Rodriguez’s commentary for Desperado, and just in that 100 minutes, you know, he gives you a pretty good outline of how to make an action movie. And it’s fascinating.
So I think these things are like an artifact, and I mean, actually, Glen had never done a DVD commentary before the one that we did. Me and Michael Bacall had done one before, but Glen had never done one. So he was really excited to do one. I think they’re important, and I would be sad if there was a day when there wasn’t the option to do one anymore.
We got two very faithful Richard Bachman adaptations this year, The Running Man and The Long Walk, but they both took a major zag with the endings, which makes sense. They’re hard to film. So, I was curious, did you ever consider using that original ending? It’s interesting in this film because we kind of get a glimpse of it, and then there’s the meta break from what we saw. So what were your thoughts on that?
We never intended to do the ending for the book. And I’d say there’s obviously a real-world parallel that happened after the book was published, which I think would make it in very poor taste to do the ending from the book. For I think very obvious reasons. So we knew right from the start, even before we’d started working on the treatment, that we weren’t gonna do that. And the idea was, well, what if we alluded to it in the sense of this is something that they’re going to frame him for.
Really, I guess without giving too much away about the ending of the book or the film, it was like, we weren’t gonna have the same fire, but what if we had the spark of the revolution, kept that. So that was the idea. It’s something that still keeps the revenge element, but also kind of has a more hopeful feel, like the start of a new movement.
So that was really the idea. To be honest, Stephen King, because he kind of has to sign off on the adaptation, he really liked the fact that we changed it, because I think he wasn’t expecting us to do the ending from the book either, and actually was glad that we didn’t. So it’s funny sometimes, I think people say, “Why don’t you do the ending from the book?” And I was thinking, ”Well, I think it’s pretty obvious why we didn’t,” and I don’t think that actually, in 2025, to have something as bleak and nihilistic as maybe not what we need right now. I think we need like that crack of light, even if it’s a very angry light [laughs].
This year was the 30th anniversary of A Fistful of Fingers, your debut Western movie. That was done on barely any budget, and now you’re doing something as big as this. So when you look back at that film and those early days, what are you most proud of?
Edgar Wright: I mean, to be honest, it’s sort of amazing to me that the film happened at all. I think it’s one of those things where it was completely powered along by this kind of youthful naivety in a way that I think if we’d have stopped to think…
I mean, I’m not sure I ever did a second draft of the script. I think, I think as soon as I’d filmed the movie and I was in editing, I did have this big existential crisis that I knew, I knew the movie wasn’t good enough, and I suddenly felt, when I was editing, I was like, “what have I done? Why have I made this goofy movie as my debut?” I mean, I actually feel better about it now, looking back, than maybe I did at the time.
But that said, you know, everybody worked on it really hard, and it was like, this is a movie that cost 20 grand total, and it did open a lot of doors for me. I basically threw that movie… it released at the cinema in the UK only on one screen, but it was still like, actually reviewed and was released in one cinema in London. I got an agent out of it, and I started doing TV.
So I have a lot to thank Fistful of Fingers for. Is it my least favorite of my filmography? Yes [laughs]. But is it like sort of a goofy movie made by a bunch of 20-year-olds? Yes. If you could appreciate it as that, then great.
Thanks to Edgar Wright for taking the time to talk about The Running Man.
Source: Comingsoon.net