THE DARK TOWER

STEPHEN KING’S EPIC SAGA HITS THE BIG SCREEN

Flash forward to Los Angeles in May 2017 and the now-44-year-old Dane is just six hours away from finalising his big-screen adaptation of King’s magnum opus, The Dark Tower, a task of Sisyphean proportions that, over the course of a decade, has scared off everybody from JJ Abrams to Damon Lindelof and Javier Bardem.

“We’re literally locking picture today, so it’s a little crazy!” Nikolaj Arcel laughs down the phone to SFX. “Every time I speak to a colleague or somebody here they go, ‘Oh my god, The Dark Tower, how did you do that?’ It’s been a little bit of a terrifying prospect for a lot of people, and for good reason. It’s certainly not been easy.”

That’s putting it lightly. Comprising eight novels, Stephen King’s bestselling saga, set in the mythical land of All-World, is the author’s masterwork; a time-hopping, fourth wall-breaking, pop culture-referencing smörgåsbord of high fantasy and lower-than-low villains. “The first is a Western, the second is an urban thriller, the third one is a fantasy saga,” says Arcel. “Even avid Stephen King readers, a lot of them have passed it by because it’s eight novels, it’s a big chunk of reading. Eight novels! It’s a rare thing.”

Even rarer, it seems, is the kind of filmmaker bold enough to attempt a cinematic translation of King’s universe. While JJ Abrams sized up an adaptation in 2007, Ron Howard got more of a foothold in 2010, envisioning an ambitious cross-platform franchise that would do justice to the source material while providing years of on-screen fantasy thrills. But it was Arcel who scaled the project all the way to the top, despite having no experience of shooting outside of Denmark (his 2012 period drama A Royal Affair was Oscar-nominated), let alone on something of this size.

The key? He dazzled execs with his “intricate knowledge of every single little weird tidbit” of the King-verse, and promptly graduated from super-fan to custodian of the author’s universe on-screen – a responsibility he didn’t take lying down. “I am such a huge fan of the novels and Stephen King. I didn’t want to disappoint myself or the fans,” Arcel admits. “I didn’t want to make something that was just like, ‘Oh, well this is nothing to do with the Dark Tower that I know and love.’ That was the biggest thing for me. I always felt that nobody could ever do these as a movie. Every time anybody tried [they failed]. There’s no way you can make eight novels into a film.”

So he didn’t try. Instead, Arcel’s version of The Dark Tower – scripted by Akiva Goldsman and produced by Howard – is “a weird kind of quasi-sequel”, neither a direct adaptation of

King’s novels, nor a total reimagining. “This is parts of novel one, novel three, six, there’s elements from various novels that bring the story more together,” Arcel explains. “So there are a lot of things where fans will go, ‘Yeah, I know this,’ they will basically recognise everything. But to do it as a straight-up adaptation, it would be five completely different films.”

Adventure time

Skipping over any kind of origin story, The Dark Tower plunges us headfirst into the plight of gunslinger Roland, a legendary knight whose guns were forged from Excalibur. He’s also the last of his kind. Roland’s family and friends are dead, killed by the Man In Black, and now he roams Mid-World, a Western frontier of dusty planes and scorching heat, seeking out the elusive Dark Tower, the structure at the nexus of the universe.

“He’s almost given up on the quest,” explains Arcel. “He’s completely alone and just wandering the desert looking for revenge.” Enter Jake, an 11-year-old New Yorker who stumbles into this strange dimension and gets caught up in Roland’s quest. If casting Idris Elba as Roland was “the easy part”, Arcel reveals the real challenge was finding their Jake. “We had 250 13-year-old boys from all over the world basically, but we got lucky with Tom Taylor,” he says. A veteran of British TV drama, having appeared in Doctor Foster and Sean Bean crime series Legends, Taylor fits the role of this film’s Frodo, tipped into a dangerous world of monsters and dark magic, with only Roland for protection.

Casting Elba, Arcel says, was a no-brainer. “He was on a very short list of Rolands and I went to him because I thought he was the coolest, the most interesting,” he says. “I loved him in The Wire, I loved Luther, I just love him as an actor and I thought he could bring something to it that wasn’t just another action hero, if that makes sense. He’d bring depth and emotionality.” And the director remains pragmatic about initial fan reactions to him casting a black actor in a role written as white. “There were a few people that got disgruntled but I haven’t felt this continuing [rebellion],” he says. “When the fans see him they’ll go, ‘Yeah, he is Roland. He’s our Roland.’”

If Roland is an archetypal Western anti-hero, his nemesis, the Man In Black, is something else entirely. In the King-verse he has many names – going by Walter Paddick, Walter O’Dim, Randall Flagg – but the only one you need to know is Satan. “The Man In Black wants to basically rule the world,” says Arcel. “Whereas Roland wants to protect the Tower, the Man In Black is on a mission to destroy it. He’s the all-powerful, all-evil sorcerer who’s trying to bring Hell upon Earth, or Earths, because there are multiple Earths and multiple worlds in this universe!”

When it came to casting the personification of evil, Arcel had only one actor in mind. “Matthew McConaughey was somebody I really wanted to work with,” the director says. “I hadn’t really seen him in many villainous roles, where he’s just an evil son of a bitch. That attracted Matthew. He said, ‘I can play the devil!’ He enjoyed just going full-on evil [laughs]. He said, ‘I’m not going to try to defend this guy I’m just going to enjoy myself and have fun with it.‘”

“Fun” was key to crafting the film’s set-pieces, including a massive village shootout between Roland and invading forces and, thanks to the fantasy angle, Arcel was able to play fast and loose with the laws of physics. “A gun fight is a gun fight, right?” he says, “and you’ve seen a lot of them. But the cool thing about Roland is that this guy’s not just a gunfighter; he’s a gun fighter who can do things that are just

IDRIS ELBA ISN’T JUST ANOTHER ACTION HERO. HE BRINGS DEPTH AND EMOTIONALITY

impossible. So he reloads almost as fast as lightning and he can shoot almost without looking. There’s a lot of cool moments where he does stuff that we had a lot of fun with.”

Of course, this being The Dark Tower, Arcel’s film wouldn’t be complete without nods to King’s other work. Eagle-eyed viewers will have already spotted the photo of the Overlook Hotel in the trailer, and Arcel promises a half a dozen more Easter Eggs in the movie. “We paid tribute to that,” he says, “not exactly like the novels do, but we definitely kept it.” While King himself has ruled out a cameo (despite writing himself into the novels as a key character), Arcel is keen to return to this world.

“We’ve created chapter one of what could easily become the saga,” he says. “Now we’ve introduced the main characters, we could very easily continue and probably be more faithful to the novels as we went. I think if people go see this one, there’s a definite way of continuing the saga in a more faithful way.”

SMALL-SCREEN SAGA

Which brings us to another “F” word: Arcel revealing he has a franchise plan “only in my head”. He adds: “I have ideas and [the studio] have ideas and at one point probably everybody will get together and have a coffee and go, ‘How do we... what’s the best way to continue?’” Before that, there’s the TV series to think about, with Arcel having already written the first two episodes of a Roland-centric prequel series based on book four, Wizard And Glass. “It’s a little bit more fantasy,” he reveals. “It takes place in Roland’s youth in Mid-World, when he was training to be a gunslinger and all was seemingly well in his world, and things just start going dark.”

Almost 30 years after he pored over King’s novels as a teenager, Arcel has accomplished a seemingly impossible feat by bringing The Dark Tower to screens. King has already sung its praises. “I loved it, it had the soul of the books,” he wrote in a letter to Arcel. More importantly, though, what would Arcel’s teen self think of the film he’s created? “I think he would be pretty happy!” Arcel laughs. “He would go, ‘Wow, that’s cool! He has magic guns!’ That’s what I would have gone crazy over when I was 12 or 13. Now, I’m more interested in the family dynamic of the father-son relationship, some of the more emotional aspects of it. So it’s a little bit for my old self and a little bit for me now.” Sounds like the best of both worlds.

The Dark Tower is out on 18 August.

ROLAND RELOADS AS FAST AS LIGHTNING AND CAN SHOOT ALMOST WITHOUT LOOKING