Director Josh Boone Talks Stephen King's The Stand, and The Vampire Lestat

Director Josh Boone says the script for his upcoming adaptation of Stephen King’s ‘The Stand’ is completed, and has won the author’s approval.

Many King fans were taken aback by reported plans to shoot the epic novel (well over 1000 pages in its uncut form) as a single movie.

However, ‘The Fault in Our Stars’ director Boone seems confident that they can pull it off.

Boone tells Collider, “I finished writing the script maybe a month ago. 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. It hews very closely to the novel.  It was such an amazing process.  I’m so familiar with [King’s] work and I’ve read so many of his books so many times over the years that it was just a really comfortable thing to be able to work with his material.  

"He gives you so much great material to work with… He writes so cinematically and his characters are so sharply drawn.  You don’t have to change much.  

"[You use] a lot of structural things to condense a thousand pages into a three-hour movie but it’s still at heart his material.  I just made it work within the confines of what a single film can be."

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'The Stand' was previously shot as a TV mini-series in the 1990s, and Warner Bros have been working on a big screen adaptation for some time.

Boone is the latest in a long line of directors to be attached to the film, others including Ben Affleck and ‘Harry Potter’ director David Yates.

Nor is ‘The Stand’ the only treasured horror novel on Boone’s radar, as he has also been linked to an adaptation of Anne Rice’s ‘The Vampire Lestat.’

Even so, Boone rejects the notion that he is becoming a horror director:

"I would argue that [Lestat’s] a romance film.  If you look at Interview with a Vampire, it’s about two people who are sort of in a toxic marriage for a century… [Lestat] really is still a character-driven story about a relationship.”

Boone goes on to emphasise that it’s very early days on ‘The Vampire Lestat’ (“I haven’t even officially been hired yet”), and also admits he doesn’t yet have a confirmed start date for shooting ‘The Stand:’

“I don’t imagine we would shoot the movie until next Spring at the earliest…  I’m still meeting actors and having budget meetings and all that.”

Rumour has it that one actor Boone may have met with is Academy Award winner Matthew McConaughey for the pivotal role of villain Randall Flagg, but nothing official has been said on this matter, 

Picture credits: Doubleday/Warner Bros.