Unpacks

I’ve been pursuing an interview with JT Mollner ever since “Strange Darling” became one of my favorite movies last year — but it took the divisive screenwriter’s history-making adaptation of “The Long Walk” for Lionsgate to finally get him on Zoom. 

“You requested a ‘Strange Darling‘ conversation, and I didn’t do it. I’ve always felt bad for not doing it. But it was because at the time, there were so many things I didn’t want to explain to people, and you were going to ask me about exactly those things,” Mollner said.

Also known for 2016’s “Angels and Outlaws,” Mollner became a major name in suspense thanks to Magenta Light Studio’s demonic date night starring Willa Fitzgerald and Kyle Gallner. With Giovanni Ribisi as his cinematographer, Mollner’s jaw-dropping psychological horror movie was buzzy out of its 2023 premiere at Fantastic Fest in Austin, Texas — but it hit controversy going wide the next year. (Spoiler alert for that movie, too: “Strange Darling” got a bad reputation among some female genre fans thanks to its venomous antagonist, an emotionally war-torn woman drunk on her own trauma, who most controversially implies a false rape allegation to get away with murder.)

“I was exhausted at the time with people misinterpreting what I was doing, and I didn’t want to get caught up in the minutiae of being defensive or over-explaining it,” said Mollner. “I made a decision to just step away.” He went on to describe a Q&A in 2018 for an unnamed film that disillusioned him with the idea of directors dissecting their own work. As a filmmaker himself, but not steering the ship here, Mollner made a special effort to support the vision of “The Long Walk” director Francis Lawrence.

“I had to get really zen about this,” Mollner said. “I knew that I was a piece of this puzzle, and I knew I was just a part of the tapestry, and that I was going to be able to contribute the source material for him to go but then watch him do his thing.” 

Now in theaters, the critically acclaimed film has been widely praised for its script, which sees Mollner adapt the supposedly “unadaptable” early novel written by Stephen King when he was just 19. The story — about a government-facilitated endurance test that sends innocent boys marching to their deaths —was published under the pseudonym Richard Bachman in 1979, more than a decade after King conceived it. As an adaptation, “The Long Walk” has only been toyed with until now.

“When I found out that George Romero and Frank Darabont had both attempted to make this movie, two of my very favorite directors, and I don’t think anybody’s ever been as good as Frank Darabont at adapting Stephen King, I was like, if neither one of these heroes of mine were able to get this done, what makes me think we can?” said Mollner. 

A mass casualty event set in a dystopian America seems like it should be more controversial than a cat-and-mouse game starring one of the most complex sadomasochists ever written, which is “Strange Darling.” But when Mollner and I finally spoke, the “Strange Darling” director brought up the earlier backlash he faced before I did. I’ve never had a problem with the gender politics of “Strange Darling”, and I didn’t waste anyone’s time asking about that nightmare here. Still, my overdue chat with Mollner explains why some writers — and King fans — understand each other better than others. 

The following conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

IndieWire: Let’s start with your history with Stephen King and the Richard Bachman novels. What’s your experience with him as an author? 

JT Mollner: The first novel I ever read was a Stephen King book. It’s hard to believe, but I was 7 years old and it was “Carrie.” I was aware of Stephen King, even as a little kid, because I remember at five or six seeing a copy of “Cujo” on my mom’s dresser, and asking her about it. The cover was very striking to me, and I was always fascinated by scary things. I did not read “Cujo.” I was too young. I couldn’t really read at that point, but I was fascinated by it, and I’ll never forget seeing it.

Then, when I went on a trip to L.A. when I was a kid — we’d been living in Vegas — and we went to this bookstore called Bart’s Books in Ojai, and I saw a copy of “Carrie.” I was in second grade, and I was with my aunt. We bought it for a buck, and I took it to school, and I started reading through. I didn’t understand a lot of it. “Carrie” has a lot of very, very adult themes, but I eventually made it through the book.

I’ll never forget, I got sent to the principal’s office because I had this obscenity on my desk, this Stephen King novel, which was for adults. My mom had to come to school, and I remember her telling the principal, “I don’t let my kid watch rated-R movies or anything like that, but I’m never going to tell him not to read.” 

From that point on, I just remember being a constant Stephen King reader. I am to this day. He is so prolific every year in September, usually, because his birthday is September 21. But I share a birthday with him … I don’t know if that has something to do with why I was so drawn to him — or shared some of that artistic DNA? Almost every year, for the last 20 years or so, every September, I usually have a pre-order of one of his books, and it’s a yearly tradition.

He’s informed so much of my writing, my writing style, my desire to be a writer. I’m really big on original stories, and I have too many original ideas to ever make them. I’m not really obsessed with finding IP to adapt. It’s not like something I need to do. But I always knew that I wanted to adapt Stephen King. So, when [producer] Roy Lee called me and asked me if I wanted to adapt “The Long Walk” for Francis Lawrence, I was all about it, and I fought really hard to get the job.

Were you already familiar with “The Long Walk” and Richard Bachman? People have talked about this being unadaptable. You had a hell of a challenge. 

I’d read the book as a teenager. I read “Carrie,” and then after that I read “The Shining,” and I read “The Stand,” “The Dark Tower” series. Then, I was probably 16, so the age of the walkers in the book when I read “The Long Walk,” and it always stuck with me. 

Over the years, I wasn’t keeping up with the trades or anything, back when a lot of these other directors were trying to make the movie. So I wasn’t aware then. That was all very daunting at first, and it is challenging material to adapt. But I think Romero or Darabont could have probably done it. 

There was another script that was supposed to get made by somebody else shortly before I did, and I think there was a timing thing going on with that as well. It was a challenge to make “The Long Walk,” but also all the elements have to come together for a movie to come together, and the studio has to be ready to green-light it. With our situation, it was just very, very fast. The only thing that slowed us down was the writers’ strike, but once the writers’ strike was over, it never stopped. We were just right into production.

People will make the thematic connection and say Francis is a perfect fit because of “The Hunger Games,” but you make it a digestible, directable challenge for him. How did you approach simplifying the story as a filmmaker yourself?

I am a director, and directors are control freaks. Not all directors maybe, but the type of director I am — I’m a control freak. I love to collaborate with department heads and actors, but I also have a very, very strong point of view as a director. When I was writing this, I started envisioning things a certain way, and then I had to get really zen about it. 

Because I thought, “Francis Lawrence is such an accomplished director. He’s made so many great movies. He’s a very different director than I am, so this isn’t going to be my movie. It’s going to be his movie.” I knew he was going to make a good movie, but I wasn’t sure if it would be my kind of movie.

I had ideas as I was writing the script, and I was fully expecting Francis to shoot things down or be like, “This is how I want this. This is how I want that.” But the beautiful thing about working with Francis was that he was very open-minded and he had no problem telling me if there was something I wanted to do that he didn’t like. That happened a couple times, and I was fine with it because once again, it’s a Francis Lawrence movie. But there were other times when I would come up with some crazy new idea, and I was like, “I wonder what Francis is going to think.” And he really got on board. 

Talk to me about some of the changes you made to adapt the book.

It was daunting because there were a hundred walkers, and there are so many things going on in the book that are so interesting for a 400-plus page novel. A lot of people mistakenly say this is a novella, or they remember it as a short story, but it’s a full-on novel. In the book, I think that Garraty [Cooper Hoffman] and McVries [David Jonsson] become the focus, but it spends a lot of time on all the characters. To make this palatable, digestible, and also cinematic in a way that would work in the under two-hour format, we had to figure out something else because I couldn’t include everything.

We reduced the character count to 50. Stephen King and Francis were really cool with that. Then, I just thought, “I want to really get into all these characters, but we’re going to have to eliminate some, and we’re going to have to amalgamate some.” Most stories are interesting to me, and I’ve never really written anything for the screen that hasn’t been a love story. So I thought, “What’s the love story here?” I decided to really focus on the relationship [between] McVries and Garraty. So it turns out to be their love story. These two guys who really are drawn to each other, who really inspire each other, and who bring out the best in each other.

With the change to the ending, that’s consistent with the DNA of King’s story. I hate the word “message,” but it’s true to his observations about the world. It was also the best way for me to articulate this love between these two characters, and thank God that Francis and Stephen King both were up for that.

You have an incredible partnership with Francis, but you also collaborated with Stephen King as a writer, on a project where you’re suggesting massive alterations to Stephen King’s work — to him. How did you meet him, and how did you not crack under the pressure?

You meet so many people when you start working in this business. With some people, you get starstruck and weird — and I respect a lot of people, but I’m not impressed or intimidated by a lot of people. He’s one of the people I’m impressed and intimidated by. [Laughs] So I’ve been terrified to meet him. Stephen King is one of those living iconic legends, so I was very nervous about what he would think. I really wanted to honor Stephen King, and I wanted to make sure that he was OK with everything. 

I had not directly interacted with him until about a month ago. During the entire writing process, even though he was a big part of the collaboration, there was never direct contact. It’s not that he doesn’t allow it or something. It just wasn’t that way. I have this feeling that he wants approval over everything because he really cares, but once he approves certain people, he also knows what it’s like to direct a movie. He directed “Maximum Overdrive.” He knows what it’s like to work on a movie. He’s acted in movies. He seems very respectful of [directors going] through an artistic process — the writer’s process. He could be totally precious and totally micromanaging, but he chooses not to be. 

We wanted to make sure he approved of big things, like that major, narrative, tectonic change in the ending. But we did not ask him to approve other, more peripheral things, like us eliminating a character or amalgamating a character into another. We didn’t ask about that. I would just write it. Then, we’d send him a draft and he’d either give a thumbs up or a thumbs down.

I thought we were going to wait a long time for him to read it, but I remember sending in the draft to the studio and them saying they wanted to do it, and then on Friday they sent it to Stephen King, and then they heard back on Sunday that he liked it — which is really weird and unheard of. But I think he read it over the course of a day and a half and said he liked it.

In changing “The Long Walk,” people are going to come to it with their own interpretation as to why you made the choice you did. Do you pitch an explanation to Stephen King? Do you care about what that explanation is?

I wonder if I’ll be able to stick to this throughout my career, but especially as a director, I mean as a writer, I don’t feel like I have the right to explain during a Q&A or anything what it’s supposed to mean. That’s up to Francis.

I won’t say who the filmmaker was, but I remember one of my favorite movies of 2018 — a very controversial movie, one of my favorite directors — was open to so much interpretation. There was so much metaphor in the movie. It was so crazy, and it was a wild film, and all these people were interpreting it differently. I remember going to a screening, and the director was doing a Q&A, and I was so excited. He proceeded to spend 40 minutes explaining to the audience exactly what each thing meant and what each metaphor was, and it just ruined the movie for me, even though I had guessed most of his intentions.

I remember someone saying to David Lynch once, something like, “What’s it mean? What’s the ending mean? I don’t understand.” And he was like, “The movie’s not meant to be understood. It’s meant to be felt.” I love it that people get different things from that. Everybody interprets things differently, and I think that’s what art is. Experiencing a movie or a painting or a book or poetry … should come down to, “What do they see in it?” But there are always intentions.

Here, I see [“The Long Walk”] as a tragedy because I believe a lot of the things that Pete’s saying during his monologues as he’s walking. I don’t think that violence is ever the answer. Violence begets more violence, and it’s a real tragedy if people succumb to their base instincts. The initial idea in this, all the sequence of events that happen in the last five minutes of the movie, was to have this mixture around that relationship, that central love story.

You get to see what people are willing to do for each other. We get to articulate loyalty and sacrifice and love. Then you see how sometimes love can drive you to the darkest places, even though the intention is good. It is really tragic to go to those dark places sometimes, and there’s a lot of that. It’s what I’m interested in exploring, and I explored it in “Strange Darling,” and I explored it in “Outlaws and Angels,” my first film. I don’t like this idea of vengeance being romanticized. There’s a real darkness surrounding that and a real tragedy surrounding that.

I would say there’s a clear message about authoritarianism in this book — and these ideologies have many, many faces and the people who are representing them. It doesn’t kill the ideology to go after those people. 

There’s something much bigger at play here, especially with The Major character [played by Mark Hamill]. We wanted him to represent something. He’s more of a construct, even though Mark Hamill does a great job fleshing him out, and there’s even dark comedic moments with him. He’s the least nuanced character in the movie and the book because he represents something. But we really wanted to know that group of walkers. We didn’t want there to be white hats and black hats, and good guys and bad guys, even though it seems like there are in the beginning. We wanted everybody to realize at some point that the enemy is on the outside.

King has described this as his bleakest novel, and he’s often talked about Bachman being this much angrier younger version of himself. I talked to Judy Greer about this, but there is a real hopeful core to the change that you’ve made to the ending. This ending is, in many ways, more true to the Stephen King we know now.

With this movie, I’ve read a few of the reviews. I used to tell myself I wouldn’t do that, but people have sent me some. There’s a few that are like, “This is so bleak and horrific,” and I just feel like everything’s relative. I feel like the movie’s very sentimental, and more so than I’m usually comfortable with. It’s weird. I really felt like I was drawn to this, even though there’s people getting killed all through it, and it couldn’t be much worse in the world than it is in this book.

You could work all your life to get all this money, and on one level, the Scrooge story comes to mind when I think of the themes in “The Long Walk,” because if you get to the end and you win and you get the prize and you get all the money, it’s getting to the end of life and focusing only on that and not having any relationships. It’s the relationships that mattered. That’s very universal and very accessible.

I don’t think Stephen King needed this to feel true to his alter ego sensibility, and I wasn’t really thinking about that. I feel like the Bachman thing now is just, it had a different meeting back then than it does now, and we really wanted it to feel like Stephen King country.

You gave Ray’s mom a name, and she doesn’t have one in the novel. Ginnie is your mom’s name, right?

It’s funny. In the initial draft, her name was just Mrs. Garraty, and she appears here and there, and she is literally called “Mrs. Garraty” in the script. Then Judy Greer got the role, which I was really excited about, and I hadn’t met Judy yet, but Francis called me during their first meeting. And she said, “Can you give me a name? I need to have a name.” That’s something actors ask for a lot, and I should have anticipated that here because she’s a very pivotal character, even though she’s not in a lot of the movie.

So he said, “Of course, she can have a name.” And Francis has this really cool style where he lets his actors know what the character is, and then he says, “Go and pick your wardrobe,” or “Go and pick this and this.” There is a world in which Francis may have said to an actor, using that directorial style, “What name do you think you should have?” But he didn’t. He came to me, and I was like, “Oh, I can do that!” I ran away before we could talk much more about it. I knew what I wanted to do.

My mom’s name is spelled G-I-N-N-I-E, which is not common. People always mistake her. They always say “Jenny” or “Jeanie.” They always get her name wrong, and she has to explain it. So that ended up in there. There’s a scene in the movie where he has to explain how his mom’s name is spelled, and I got to sit in the premiere with my mom next to me as she was watching that scene. It was a surprise, and it was really cool. I’m very close with my mom and my dad.

Well, she was defending you for reading Stephen King in class! 

Yes, exactly.

“The Long Walk” is now in theaters.