Stephen King in conversation with Edgar Wright: “When I wrote The Running Man, 2025 seemed so far in the future that I couldn’t even grasp it in my mind”

“Welcome to America in 2025 when the best men don’t run for president. They run for their lives…” So said the original book jacket tagline for Stephen King’s The Running Man, which depicts a dystopian future in which a government-controlled TV network pacifies the populace with the bloodthirsty gameshow of the title. Though it was first published in 1982, King had written it a decade earlier under the pen name Richard Bachman. It gained wider appreciation in 1985, when it was published in ‘The Bachman Books’ compendium, alongside other early novellas Rage (1977), The Long Walk (1979) and Roadwork (1981).

Two years after that book came out, Arnold Schwarzenegger starred as King’s everyman hero Ben Richards in Paul Michael Glaser’s loose adaptation of The Running Man, which kept the notion of a deadly gameshow but little else. Even given the glacially slow way Hollywood’s wheels can turn, it feels remarkable that Edgar Wright’s more faithful version is now coming out in the very year the novel was set, once envisaged by King as the distant future.

Here, Richards is played by Glen Powell, the charismatic actor who played the lead in Richard Linklater’s comedy Hit Man (2023). An unemployed construction worker in a financial bind, he reluctantly auditions for ‘The Running Man’, a game in which contestants must survive for 30 days on the streets as a team of professional assassins hunts them down. The film has the same brio as Wright’s earlier American productions, in particular his videogame homage Scott Pilgrim vs. the World (2010). That film was scripted by Michael Bacall, who co-writes here, and featured Michael Cera, who joins Josh Brolin, Colman Domingo, William H. Macy and Emilia Jones in The Running Man cast.

Wright first attracted King’s attention with his zombie comedy Shaun of the Dead in 2004. When I joined the pair to discuss the new film, it was clear how much affection the director has for King, a man so punctual he was ten minutes early in the video-call waiting room. While he’s known to be outspoken about movie adaptations of his work, King has also always been encouraging to directors (notably running the Dollar Baby programme, offering student filmmakers the chance to option the rights to his short stories for $1).

With The Running Man one of several adaptations from King’s body of work released this year – including Osgood Perkins’ The Monkey, Francis Lawrence’s The Long Walk and Jack Bender’s television series The Institute – his popularity appears undimmed. Despite the autocrats in power around the globe, the audiences of 2025 still appear to crave King’s even bleaker dystopias.

James Mottram: Did you ever imagine there would be a film of The Running Man coming out in the year that you set it?

Stephen King: No! Of course not. [Originally] I sent it to a paperback publisher, DAW Books, and got back a very stiff note saying, “We here at DAW Books do not publish dystopian fiction.”

It’s very hard to know how to even react to a comment like that…

Edgar Wright: In the movie, we don’t say what year it is. And the reason we don’t is because I’m always very conscious that in films with dystopian future worlds, they never can go far enough. I wish we were living in 2001 as Stanley Kubrick saw it in 1968. We’re not even there now. Or Escape to New York, which I love, is a 1981 film, set in the year 1997. We’re way past that too. So you have to throw it further, or just don’t date it at all.

King: I just thought to myself, when I wrote the book 2025 just seemed so far in the future that I couldn’t even grasp it in my mind.

Stephen, you once called it “a book written by a young man who was angry, energetic, and infatuated with the art and the craft of writing”. What was the seed for The Running Man?

King: I wanted to write an adventure story that would sell because we were living on chips and dip and things like that, and we had two kids – they were eating better than we were. So I wanted to write a book that would sell. And obviously this one was not it, based on the whole dystopian thing, but I wanted to write about a world that was so savage that gameshows had become entertainment.

Wright: What’s really interesting in the book is that ‘The Running Man’ is one of a number of shows, and it suggests a much bigger world. ‘The Running Man’ is the deadliest one. But in the book there’s ‘How Hot Can You Take It?’ and ‘Treadmill for Bucks’…

King: ‘Swim the Alligators’ was my favourite.

Wright: That’s what I find fascinating about the novel. There’s a lot of things about it that are very prescient, the fact that you really thought about an entire network.

The book was made into a movie in 1987. How did you feel about another director taking a shot at it?

King: I think things worked out really well. Sometimes you just ride with an angel, so to speak. And my angel was Edgar Wright. I mean, obviously, we live in a reality-based world, and so many things are gameshows now, even politics. They’re already talking about 2026, and the elections, and that’s part of the game. It’s all part of a competition.

Wright: I’ve had an ongoing email correspondence with Stephen for quite a number of years now. The first time we were in contact was after Shaun of the Dead, when Stephen was very kind to give us an amazing print quote for our ad campaign.

King: We talked around Baby Driver [2017] too…

Wright: Yeah, exactly. And I think around that time…after you were so nice about Baby Driver, I would send you rock albums, like the Australian band King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard, and Sunflower Bean and other bands I thought you would dig. 

I’d read the book when the Bachman books were re-released in the mid-80s… I was probably about 14. So when I finally saw the 1987 film, as a young film fan – probably still in my teens – it was the first time I watched something and was very aware of how loose the adaptation was… they didn’t really adapt the book at all. They used some of the setup, but the bulk of the story hadn’t been adapted. That always stuck with me, that there was a whole other film in the source material. 

I had actually looked into the rights for The Running Man as far back as 15 years ago, and at that time it was complicated and didn’t really go anywhere. 

So it’s kind of kismet that they eventually came to me. Simon Kinberg, one of the producers, emailed me – a magic email – asking “Is it true you’re interested in adapting The Running Man?” And I said, “Yeah. I’ve actually been thinking about it for years.” 

And the fact that it’s being released in 2025 – a 2025 release for a book set in 2025 – is a coincidence, but a wild one. We’re literally sneaking in in the last six weeks of 2025 as well.

When did you finally meet each other?

Wright: We actually met finally in person a couple of weeks ago, which was joyous. I really wanted to meet Stephen before the film came out. I told him this the other day. I had been working on it since 2021, but I knew you knew I was probably working it, but I didn’t want to talk to you about it over email until I knew it was almost definitely going to happen, because I didn’t want to be like the boy who cried wolf. And the idea of talking to you about it and then it not coming together would have been so heartbreaking. I waited until the last minute, and then I emailed Stephen and said, “Now, as you’re probably aware…”

The film’s use of deep fakes, when Richards’ videos are doctored by the network, was particularly terrifying. How did you conceptualise that?

Wright: You have that in the book. That’s the scene with Bradley [the young, impoverished rebel in King’s story who details the systemic horrors of the society], where they basically manipulate what he’s said when it goes on TV.

King: I thought it was a thing where you’d be able to mess around with film… but by the time that they got there, they would be able to do these deep fakes with a lot of perfection, so to speak. And I love that idea. But the other thing I liked is where the guy says, “By the way, you’re on Free-Vee” and there are these drones that are basically movie cameras, TV cameras, floating around in the void and following people everywhere. And that certainly does happen now, and it’s just a question of adapting it for the mass audience. So, I mean, everybody’s got a cell phone and they take videos of everything.

Wright: The person who says that line in the film, “You’re on Free-Vee,” is Michael Bacall, who co-wrote the script. That’s his cameo. Since the book in 1982, and especially with the last 25 years of reality TV, I think people have become very aware of how a narrative is created in the edit. There’s even a phrase for it now in reality TV, ‘the villain edit’, where they can make somebody like the pantomime villain.

King: Wow! Are you kidding me? It’s a thing. Amazing. The villain edit!

Wright: I actually only learned that term the other day. If you think about The Real Housewives [2006-] and shows like that, somebody always has to be the pantomime villain… This happens a lot in reality TV. 

And just before we started filming with Colman [Domingo] and Josh Brolin, who play Bobby T and Killian, that Jerry Springer documentary [Jerry Springer: Fights, Camera, Action, 2025] was on Netflix. It was real confirmation of everything that was in the screenplay and in your book – the manipulation of contestants, the producers whipping people up into a frenzy, the question of how complicit Jerry Springer himself was. 

On camera he’d say, “I’m just the host. I don’t know what’s going to happen.” But the documentary suggests he knew a lot more about what was happening behind the scenes. But even on the more friendly side, singing competitions… there are the same sort of machinations and Machiavellian editing going on behind the scenes. I think the audience now is somewhat wise to that or at least can see that it’s happening. It’s coming to all parts of social media.

Can you envisage a world where we might get reality shows where it gets really violent?

Wright: We are about as close as we can get.

King: I can remember. I worked in a wet wash laundry, and I worked with a skinny guy who is just totally Maine…probably a sixth-grade education or something like that. And he said, “You mark my words. Someday on TV, there’ll be nudies, there’ll be people showing their breasts and their bush and everything.” And I said, “Nah, that’ll never happen. That’ll never happen.” But here we are. Here we are in that world and the world where you can show violence, you can show all sorts of things. And again, there’s that sense of people becoming anaesthetised to that thing. I can see that happening. We had a show over here called The Biggest Loser [2004-20]. It was really obese people who had to crash-diet, and several of them got sick. So… that happens. The audience would say, certainly, well, they signed on for it. They deserve it.

Edgar, why did you choose to cast Glen Powell?

Wright: I was aware of Glen before actually meeting him. I’d seen him in Everybody Wants Some!! [2016] and obviously in Top Gun: Maverick [2022], but when later I saw him in Hit Man [2023], which he co-wrote, I thought he really had chops as a dramatic actor and a comedic actor. But the other very important thing about Glen is he has this everyman quality, which not all action stars have, and that felt really important.

When a movie like this goes into development, the studio gives you a list of stars, and Glen was the one person on the list where I thought that a) I hadn’t seen him already killing tons of baddies onscreen and b) I would buy him as a guy off the street. It’s a similar quality to Harrison Ford. It might seem like a strange comparison between Indiana Jones and Ben Richards, but the thing with Harrison Ford in a lot of his early roles is that he’s fallible — he’s not perfect, he’s winging it a lot of the time, and sometimes he spends a lot of the film on his heels. When I think about Raiders of the Lost Ark [1981], I think about Indy getting punched in the face and dropping like a sack of potatoes.

A lot of action these days has characters who are already the best at what they do — John Wick is the best hitman ever, Jason Bourne is an amnesiac but was this formidable superspy. The thing about Ben Richards, in the book at least, is that he’s not already an action hero. In the film, we have him working in construction, so he’s tough, but he’s not a trained killer and not a superhero. And hopefully the net result in the movie is you think, “How can this guy possibly win?”

Richards is encouraged to be an instigator of revolution. This film comes shortly after Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another, another story about social revolution. Is this more than coincidence? Or are audiences fed up with those in power?

King: I always thought that this would be a wonderful way to get rid of people who were dangerous to the overlords.

Wright: It’s interesting with that movie as well. As it was about to come out, before I’d seen it, I suddenly realised, like, “Oh…” and I had to ask somebody working on it: “Are you using the Gil Scott-Heron song, ‘The Revolution Will Not Be Televised’?” They said, “Yes.” I said, “Oh, OK, that’s also in our film.” And then I thought, “Well, you know what? If there was any calendar year where ‘The Revolution Will Not Be Televised’ turns up in two movies, this is it.”

But do you both feel that film, even a visceral action-adventure like this, should hold up a mirror to society?

Wright: This is in all of your work, Stephen. I always felt like the horror genre and the sci-fi genre can speak to real-world issues. In a way, it’s like holding up a fun-house mirror to reality, but it is also like a Trojan horse, in that you can actually reach a wider audience through genre than you might with a drama about the same subject. And sometimes the best of genre sneaks in the message without you even really necessarily being aware of it, subconsciously. I mean, the classic one, way back in the day, is Invasion of the Body Snatchers [1956]. The original, the Don Siegel one, because that movie is a perfect one, where it speaks to the political side. You could take the metaphor, and back in those days, they would never have to say out loud. They probably didn’t do any press tours for Invasion of the Body Snatchers – they wouldn’t even have to say out loud what the metaphor was. But what’s great about that movie is like, “Oh, is it about the McCarthy witch hunts? Or is it about the invasion of the Russians?” It works both ways, but the thing that’s amazing with genre and Stephen, you can speak to this because obviously, you’ve been doing it for your entire career, is how you can talk about something real through fantasy, through sci-fi, through horror.

King: I always thought that The Running Man had something to say… [George Orwell’s 1949 novel] Nineteen Eighty-Four, that was the touchstone that I kept coming back to. Nineteen Eighty-Four is literature. The Running Man, the book is just an entertainment. But it’s an entertainment with that subtext that says, “Don’t necessarily trust. Think a little bit about what this media is doing to you. Never mind if its entertaining you. What’s it doing to you and what is it preparing you for?” 

The difference is, though, Orwell, never lived to see the actual year 1984. You have lived to see 2025. So after writing the book, are you now shocked as to where we are?

King: I don’t think I knew it was going to be this bad. I never assumed it was going to be a world with AI and a world where you see these movies where the main character finally tips wise to what’s going on and [reaches to cover his webcam with his hand] tapes over the little thing on their camera. Because you realise, again, what I’m saying is it goes both ways. What you’re watching can be watching you.

Wright: Well, it’s interesting. When we were working on the adaptation, and it’s a 1982 book, there’s an element of analogue technology in the book. And when me and Michael Bacall were first talking about it, the first thought was like, “Oh, well, obviously we have to update that stuff.” And then we thought, “No, wait, maybe we shouldn’t.” How many times have you said something and then on your phone, you’re being advertised something and saying, “Hey, I didn’t write that into the computer. How did they know that I said that?” Your laptop and your smartphone are listening to you.

King: It’s creepy, isn’t it?

Wright: It’s happened a number of times. And people are starting to become aware of that. There’s the line that William H. Macy said in the film about the cathode-ray TVs, when Ben Richards says, “Do you sell a lot of these?” He goes, “Oh, I can’t keep them on the shelves. These TVs don’t watch you back.” And for a book from 1982 and a 2025 film, the idea of the paper zines and the use of analogue technology and people starting to revert to something which they feel maybe they can’t be tracked, it felt weirdly like, “Well, this isn’t dated at all. This hasn’t gone away. If anything, this is going to get bigger.”

King: What you said about the world and whether or not I imagined it in 1982 or whenever the book was published…it was written, actually, years before that. But that in itself, is the subject for a book. What we were and what we have become, and how it happened. I mean, it’s like that story about a frog in a pot. If you turn the heat up slowly enough, it doesn’t realise it is cooking.

You’re a vocal supporter of other horror movies on social media, Stephen. You recently lavished praise on Zach Cregger’s Weapons. Do you feel horror cinema in a good state?

King: I think it is. Simple answer to that question. A movie like Weapons, which is subversive – it’s almost like found footage, in a way – that movie couldn’t have happened twelve or fourteen, years ago. Have you seen that, Edgar?

Wright: Oh, absolutely. Another great Josh Brolin performance in 2025 as well.

This year has also seen the release of The Monkey, The Life of Chuck, The Long Walk and the TV series prequel It: Welcome to Derry. Are you amazed at how directors keep returning to your work?

King: It’s been amazing. It’s like having a bumper crop all at once. The thing is, people talk about, “I would like to make this into a movie”, or “I want to have an option on this property here.” Books become properties when they switch to movies and to TV, so you spread the seed on the ground. And this year, everything came up. It’s crazy, but it’s kind of wonderful.

Wright: I saw Mark Hamill last night in Los Angeles, and I invited him to a screening of The Running Man, which he couldn’t attend. And I said to him, “I wanted you to see the only Stephen King film this year that you’re not in!” I guess he’s not in The Monkey, but he is in The Long Walk and The Life of Chuck. So Mark’s having a great Stephen King year as well.

King: This is off the subject completely, but when he plays the grandfather in Life of Chuck, I think he deserves a nomination for an Academy Award. For that part, he did a terrific job.

Circling back to The Running Man, Stephen, you referred to Edgar’s version on social media as “a modern-day Die Hard”. Is that how you feel?

King: Yeah, it’s just got a twinkle in it.

Wright: It’s also a similar thing, in the first Die Hard [1988], where, yes, John McClane is a cop, but also he’s flying by the seat of his pants for a lot of the movie. What makes that film exciting is it seems that in large portions of the film that John McClane is out of his depth against these terrorists. And obviously, in the best of action adventure, there’s got to be some sense that the hero could die. I think the first Die Hard is an action classic, and it just totally works.

The thing is that action heroes need to have vulnerability. What’s great watching Glen do it is that he’s just reacting in real time to what’s happening.

The other big part of the book that we really wanted to bring to the screen was the idea that it was all in the first person, that it’s all subjective from his point of view, that and you get to experience being on the show. And it’s funny, some people who watched it said, “I felt like I was on the show because I’m seeing everything from his point of view.”

King: He’s an immensely likeable character, and he has that in common with McClane in Die Hard. So, I mean, it’s important to have a likeable main character, and he really is, and he feels fleshed out. It’s good.

The Running Man is in cinemas from 12 November.