Thema: The Dark Tower – Production Thread

Teilnehmer

“The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed.”

Regisseur: Nikolaj Arcel
Produzenten: Ron Howard, Akiva Goldsman, Brian Grazer, Stephen King
Drehbuch: Nikolaj Arcel, Anders Thomas Jensen, Ron Howard, Jeff Pinkner
Cinematographer: Rasmus Videbæk
Buchvorlage: Der Dunkle Turm
Musik: unbekannt
VFX: unbekannt
Produktion: Weed Road Pictures, Imagine Entertainment, Media Rights Capital
Vertrieb: Columbia Pictures
Drehbeginn: April 2016, Südafrika
Erscheinungstermin: 17.02.2017 (USA)

Besetzung:

05.08.2015: slashfilm | Stephen King’s ‘Dark Tower’ Directed By Nikolaj Arcel to Hit Theaters In January 2017

slashfilm wrote:

Update From Editor Peter Sciretta: Sony has officially announced they will be releasing Stephen King’s Dark Tower directed by Nikolaj Arcel on January 13th 2017. The film is scheduled to go head to head with Fox’s animated film Boss Baby and Lionsgate’s Power Rangers movie.

The original story by Angie Han from June 2nd 2015 follows:

After many years of difficult development, The Dark Tower is about to take a big step forward. The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo co-writer Nikolaj Arcel has reportedly emerged as the top choice to direct the Stephen King adaptation. Ron Howard and Stephen King are producing. Get details on the potential Dark Tower Nikolaj Arcel hire below.

Deadline broke the news that Arcel is about to enter talks to direct and rewrite The Dark Tower. Arcel is reportedly a huge fan of King’s The Dark Tower book series, and really just King in general. Apparently he even taught himself English so he could appreciate King’s books in their original language. Sony, in turn, likes that Arcel is a big Stephen King fan, and that he’s comfortable with dark material.

Efforts to adapt King’s The Dark Tower have been going on for years, first at Universal and then at Warner Bros. Earlier this year, Sony climbed on board and set the project on the fast track.

The Dark Tower centers around gunslinger Roland Deschain, who lives in a world reminiscent of the Old West but with magic. Roland embarks on a quest to find the titular Dark Tower, supposedly the nexus of all universes.

The current plan is to turn The Dark Tower into an interlocking TV and film franchise — specifically, a film series with an accompanying TV series. Arcel would be directing the first Dark Tower film. It’ll be based on the first Dark Tower book, The Gunslinger, and center on Roland’s relationship with his protégé Jake Chambers.

Akiva Goldsman and Jeff Pinkner wrote the most recent draft of the Dark Tower script. Goldsman is also producing along with King, Howard, and Brian Grazer, and Pinkner serves as executive producer with Erica Huggins.

Arcel is best known in the U.S. for scripting (with Rasmus Heisterberg) the Swedish adaptation of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, and for directing the Best Foreign Film Oscar nominee A Royal Affair. He has two other literary adaptations on his to-do list right now, Don Winslow’s The Power of the Dog and Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca.

Once Arcel is set, the next step will be casting. Actors like Javier Bardem and Russell Crowe have flirted with The Dark Tower lead at various points, but any attachments fell away when the project moved over to Sony.

01.03.2016: Entertainment Weekly | Stephen King confirms stars Idris Elba and Matthew McConaughey as production nears start

Entertainment Weekly wrote:

The tower has begun to peek above the horizon.

After many years, and many attempts, a film version of Stephen King’s The Dark Tower is finally getting underway with Idris Elba confirmed as the gunslinger and Matthew McConaughey as the mystical foe known as the man in black.

Both the author and the movie’s director and co-writer, Nikolaj Arcel, spoke exclusively with EW about the plan to begin adapting the six-shooter-and-sorcery tale — which spans eight novels, assorted comic books and short stories, and is frequently referenced throughout King’s body of work.

“The thing is, it’s been a looong trip from the books to the film,” King says, putting it right in context: “When you think about it, I started these stories as a senior in college, sitting in a little sh-tty cabin beside the river in Maine, and finally this thing is actually in pre-production now.” He laughs. “I’m delighted, and I’m a little bit surprised.”

Arcel, who is best known for the 2012 Danish film A Royal Affair and for co-writing the Swedish version of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, says he will start shooting The Dark Tower in South Africa in seven weeks, and Sony Pictures plans to have it in theaters on Jan. 13, 2017.

Arcel will share screenwriting credit with Anders Thomas Jensen, Akiva Goldsman, and Jeff Pinkner. The producers will be Goldman and his Weed Road company; Ron Howard, Brian Grazer, and Erica Huggins of Imagine Entertainment; and Pinkner as executive producer.

“What Stephen King does best is mixing the everyday, or what you might call the mundane, with the fantastical,” says Arcel. “In my view, [The Dark Tower] novels are a mix between sci-fi and fantasy and modern times. That exact mix is so Stephen King.”

King says the movie will open with the first line from the first book. “It should start that way,” he says. “I’ve been pretty insistent about that.”

It’s easy to imagine that phrase being The Dark Tower’s version of “A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away …,” serving to introduce almost any part of the saga. But this first film will not adapt the plot of the first book, The Gunslinger, published in 1982.

“[The movie] starts in media res, in the middle of the story instead of at the beginning, which may upset some of the fans a little bit, but they’ll get behind it, because it is the story,” King says.

Arcel declined to specify which books his movie focus on, but he did offer this clue: “A lot of it takes place in our day, in the modern world.”

THE PATH OF THE BEAM

For those who haven’t turned the pages of The Dark Tower books, they tell the story of the fallen land of Mid-World through the eyes of Roland Deschain, a sort of frontiersman knight whose primary weapon is not a sword but a pair of revolvers. He’s on a quest to save his decaying world by reaching the tower that stands at the nexus point in time and space.

The man in black – a devil who goes by many names, but mostly Walter Padick or Walter O’Dim – is an ageless deceiver and sorcerer who also seeks to reach the tower and rule over its seemingly infinite kingdoms.

To complete his journey, Roland must call on help from our world, drawing a junkie named Eddie, an amputee named Susannah, and a young boy named Jake into his realm to be part of his ka-tet – the term for a group brought together by destiny. Their yellow brick road is one of the six invisible beams that hold Roland’s world together – and lead directly to the tower itself.

Although Arcel and King aren’t ready to reveal which books the movie may cover, we can use their clues to do a little soothsaying: Since the fourth novel in the eight-book series, 1997’s Wizard and Glass, is almost entirely a flashback about Roland’s youth and lost love, it’s a good guess that the movies may start with 1993’s The Waste Lands, the third book in the series, which is where much of King’s broader tower mythology began to coalesce. Its story involves the ka-tet’s efforts to connect with Jake, who lives in a far-off “where” (New York City) and a different “when” (1977 in the novel – although that could easily be changed to now.) But that’s just speculation.

As for additional casting, Mad Max: Fury Road actress Abbey Lee is reportedly in talks for the role of Tirana, but it’s not clear yet who will play the other main characters. More announcements are expected in the weeks ahead.

For now, Arcel is starting by introducing his hero and villain. Although it may be a surprise to some, who are used to picturing Roland as the blue-eyed white man depicted in the book’s illustrations, he says it was “a no-brainer” to cast Elba as the gunslinger. King agrees.

THE GUNSLINGER

“For me, it just clicked. He’s such a formidable man,” says Arcel, who says he’s been a fan of Elba’s since The Wire. “I had to go to Idris and tell him my vision for the entire journey with Roland and the ka-tet. We discussed, who is this character? What’s he about? What’s his quest? What’s his psychology? We tried to figure out if we saw the same guy. And we absolutely had all the same ideas and thoughts. He had a unique vision for who Roland would be.”

King is a fan of the choice, and says he’s looking forward to seeing Elba bring Roland to life. “I love it. I think he’s a terrific actor, one of the best working in the business now,” the author says. But he admits he had a different actor in mind when he started writing the books 46 years ago – almost three years before Elba was even born.

“I visualized [Clint] Eastwood as Roland,” King says. “I loved the Spaghetti Westerns and all those widescreen close-ups of his face, especially the ones where he’d been left out in the desert and was all covered with blisters and sunburn. I thought, ‘That’s my Roland.’”

Ol’ Clint was more of an inspiration point, however. “As the years went by, [the character] became a more particular individual in my own mind,” King says. “He wasn’t Eastwood anymore. He was just … Roland.”

The author, who raves about Elba’s recent work in the child-soldier drama Beasts of No Nation, says he hopes fans of the books have no problem accepting a man of color as Roland. “For me the character is still the character. It’s almost a Sergio Leone character, like ‘the man with no name,’” King says. “He can be white or black, it makes no difference to me. I think it opens all kind of exciting possibilities for the backstory.”

Arcel acknowledges that skin color actually was an important factor in the relationship between Roland and Susannah, the black amputee he drew into his world from her life in 1964. In the books, she is not thrilled to find herself yanked into another dimension by a grizzled white guy. “Some fans are asking, understandably, ‘What about the racial tension?’” Arcel says. “But as the story progresses that will be made clear, how we’ll deal with all those things.”

THE MAN IN BLACK

This is an especially tricky character, in more ways than one. In The Gunslinger, he was like the shark in Jaws — mostly unseen, although his menace permeated the story. He’s a big part of Roland’s past, and weaves into the story as the novels continue. The movie will draw him further out of the shadows.

Even King says he never had a clear image of the man in black’s face, maybe because it kept changing. “I never really thought of him,” the author says. “But [in the movie] he becomes a character who isn’t just a mirage that Roland is chasing. The way things are set up, he’s right there.”

That shapeshifting quality is what drew Arcel to the Dallas Buyers Club Oscar-winner. “Matthew is an incredible actor who can do anything. That’s how I feel about Walter Padick. He could do anything,” the director says.

Those who know King’s other work will recognize the man in black as the same villain from both The Stand and the fantasy The Eyes of the Dragon. “He is this timeless sorcerer, and being a Stephen King fan, I’ve read and experienced Walter in various iterations,” Arcel says. “He has a very interesting way of seeing the world. He sees it with a sort of delight, even though he is obviously on the wrong side of the light-and-dark spectrum. He’s someone I’ve been having a lot of fun with.”

OTHER WORLDS THAN THESE

Fans who may be rejoicing that the story is finally headed to the screen have had their hosannas stifled before, but this time the movie is definitely happening.

For decades, The Dark Tower has defied adaptation – first by being incomplete, as King’s novels were spread out over decades, and then simply by being such a vast, genre-bending story. In 2010 director Ron Howard began trying to assemble a multi-platform approach to filming it, with Javier Bardem in the lead role of Roland. Howard’s innovative plan was to have a trio of movies that would follow the gunslinger’s quest to reach the tower, which would be accompanied by a cable TV series that could serve as a kind of prequel, filling in backstory.

“There were a lot of people who had trouble with that concept at first,” King says. “It’s tough to get show-people to actually try something new, which is one of the reasons they’re so bent out of shape about Netflix, and Beasts of No Nation. But little by little, people started to get on board with the idea.”

Akiva Goldsman, who won the adapted screenplay Oscar for writing A Beautiful Mind, began work on the scripts, and he and Howard even visited King to help break down which parts of the story they should tell onscreen.

“Ron has been a huge supporter of this project from the very beginning. I think the reason was his wife was crazy about the books,” King says. “He came up to Maine, and we talked about it for a long time in the backyard. We were actually playing catch. We had baseball gloves, and were saying, ‘We could do this with it… We could do that with it …’”

That was the first time anybody suggested to King that maybe there could be a collection of movies and also a TV series telling the same story from different directions.

Universal Pictures was set to launch this ambitious project, the Warner Bros. explored the possibility, but cold feet and money got in the way, King says. The project came back to life thanks to Tom Rothman, chairman of Sony’s motion picture group, who saw the possibility for a new fantasy franchise.

Goldsman’s script became the foundation for the new film, and King says a successful movie could revive Howard’s broader plan. That’s one reason for saving the earlier part of the narrative, depicting Roland’s younger days. “They’re still holding on to this idea that they can do a TV series, and they’ve got it pegged for that,” King says.

If they end up moving forward in the timeline, there’s another challenge the filmmakers will one day have to face: A younger version of King himself turns up as a character in The Dark Tower saga.

Although this is not a part of the first film, Arcel says he would want the author to eventually play himself. But King says no way: “I’m too old.”

For now, The Dark Tower is one movie, with only the possibility of more.

“Other people have tried fantasy spectacle. Sometimes it works, sometimes it works really well when it’s based on a series of books, like The Hunger Games or Harry Potter, and sometimes it doesn’t,” King says. “What I have to go back to is this: We have Idris Elba and Matthew McConaughey, two great actors. You’ve got a great production team and Akiva Goldsman as the primary script writer. The team is in place, so we’ll hope for the best.”

That’s called putting your faith in the ka-tet.

09.03.2016: Entertainment Weekly | Aaron Paul says a Dark Tower role ‘would be pretty cool’

10.03.2016: Entertainment Weekly | Tom Taylor cast in The Dark Tower as Jake Chambers

Entertainment Weekly wrote:

Roland Deschain’s ka-tet has begun to form, as Idris Elba’s gunslinger in the long-awaited Dark Tower movie has found his Jake Chambers.

Sources close to the production have confirmed to EW that newcomer Tom Taylor will play the key role of Jake Chambers, a young boy who Roland crosses paths with in the series’ first book on his hunt of the man in black. Taylor previously appeared in the BBC series Doctor Foster and also showed up in the now-cancelled TNT series, Legends, as the younger version of Sean Bean’s protagonist, Martin Odum.

Jake is one of the key players in Roland’s pursuit of the Dark Tower, a member of his ka-tet — a group gathered together by destiny. In the novels, Roland pulls the members of his ka-tet from various time periods in New York. His encounters and relationship with Jake, however, are much more complicated, as he first runs into the boy while chasing the man in black in his own world.

Tayor joins a cast that includes Elba as Roland and Matthew McConaughey as the man in black.

12.04.2016: Screenrant | Dark Tower Principle Photography Has Started

Screenrant wrote:

It seems like the big-screen adaptation of Stephen King’s The Dark Tower has been in the works for ages, with little in the way of actual progress being made. Even when casting began on the epic story, some fans were likely wondering if it would actually get made this time. Well, now chances seem pretty good, as principle photography on the project has begun.

Sony Pictures made the announcement that The Dark Tower has started filming at CinemaCon, one of many major movie announcements made during the day. This one likely had a number of Stephen King fans breathing a sigh of relief, however, since it seemed there was always something getting in the way of the film moving forward. Director Nikolaj Arcel’s adaptation is slated to be the first part of The Dark Tower series, with this initial offering being based on the first book The Gunslinger.

Steady progress has been made on the film in recent months, with stars Idris Elba and Matthew McConaughey being officially added to the film just last month after being courted since late last year. Elba will play gunslinger Roland Deschain in the film, while McConaughey will play the villainous Man in Black. Relative newcomer Tom Taylor will play Jake Chambers, a boy from the real world who gets pulled in to Deschain’s quest. There are a few other key roles that have not been officially filled, though with filming commencing there should be more announcements about casting soon.

This is exciting for King fans, as The Dark Tower series has a devoted fan base. Studios have struggled to adapt the series for years, with talk of various approaches such as multiple films or films with full seasons of a television show in between. King and a few others (such as Ron Howard) have long held that the series was still going to be adapted, but after so many false starts it began to seem like a dream that just wasn’t going to come true.

With an anticipated February 2017 release, things should continue moving quickly. There’s no word yet on the amount of practical effects vs. CGI that will be in the film, though it’s unlikely to be a CGI extravaganza given the relatively short production time and the February release. While Deadpool has proven that February doesn’t have to be the month where movies go to die, it’s unlikely that Sony would try to release a major FX-heavy blockbuster so early in the year.

THE DARK TOWER movie is filming; IT begins soon. Pretty cool.

— Stephen King (@StephenKing) 13. April 2016

14.04.2016: Deadline | Jackie Earle Haley To Co-Star In ‘The Tick’ Amazon Pilot, Joins ‘The Dark Tower’ Film

Deadline wrote:

Oscar-nominated actor Jackie Earle Haley is set for a key villainous regular role opposite Peter Serafinowicz in the Amazon pilot The Tick, a new take on Ben Edlund‘s comic book character with an all-new cast. Additionally, he is in negotiations for a co-starring role opposite Idris Elba and Matthew McConaughey in The Dark Tower.

Deadline wrote:

Feature The Dark Tower, co-written and directed by Nikolej Arcel, is based on the Stephen King novels, with Akiva Goldman, Ron Howard, Brian Grazer and Erica Huggins producing. Haley will play Sayre, a menacing humanoid who is the vampire leader and kowtows to no one.

27.04.2016: Entertainment Weekly | The Dark Tower adds Vikings star Katheryn Winnick

Entertainment Weekly wrote:

[img]http://www.ew.com/sites/default/files/styles/tout_image_612x380/public/i/2016/04/27/kat-win.jpg?itok=mYyeCog5[/img]
Vikings star Katheryn Winnick has signed up for The Dark Tower, the film adaptation of the popular Stephen King series, her rep tells EW.

The Canadian actress, whose role in the film is unknown, joins Idris Elba, Matthew McConaughey, and newcomer Tom Taylor in director Nikolaj Arcel’s take on the King novels. Sony declined to comment.

The Dark Tower series follows Roland Deschain, a.k.a. The Gunslinger, (Elba) on his pursuit of the Dark Tower; the quest finds him pitted against the mysterious man in black (McConaughey).

Last month, King spoke exclusively to EW about his hopes for the film and a possible franchise. “Other people have tried fantasy spectacle. Sometimes it works, sometimes it works really well when it’s based on a series of books, like The Hunger Games or Harry Potter, and sometimes it doesn’t,” King said. ”What I have to go back to is this: We have Idris Elba and Matthew McConaughey, two great actors. You’ve got a great production team and Akiva Goldsman as the primary script writer. The team is in place, so we’ll hope for the best.”

The film will be released on Feb. 17, 2017.