Everything We Know About The Dark Tower

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Stephen King’s The Dark Tower – seemingly doomed to spend eternity in development hell – has finally begun to show signs of life after King confirmed that Matthew McConaughey and Idris Elba now officially attached in leading roles.

Sharing the news via his own twitter feed, King specifically chose 09:19 local time, a sly reference to The Dark Tower, to confirm the pairs involvement – although he had to delete and repost the news at less significant time after he misspelt Idris Elba’s name.

The pair have been touted to star for a while now; last year, rumours had McConaughey being offered his pick of any of the main roles, while Elba has been circling the role of the gunslinger Roland Deschain -a man on a quest to save his decaying world by reaching the tower that stands at the nexus point in time and space.

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, and that fate happens to lie at one of the six invisible beams that hold Roland’s world together – which leads directly to the tower itself.

Now it seems McConaughey has decided to take the darker, more mysterious part of ‘man in black’ - a devil who goes by many names, but mostly Walter Padick or Walter O’Dim – who is an ageless deceiver and sorcerer; seeking to reach the tower and rule over its seemingly infinite kingdoms.

It’s been a long journey from page to screen for Ron Howard and Akiva Goldsman’s adaptation. The project has passed from J.J Abrams to Howard himself, and now A Royal Affair director and co- writer of the Swedish version of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo Nikolaj Arcel is in the hot seat (Howard and Goldman are now producers); working from a script by Arcel, Goldman, Danish filmmaker Anders Thomas Jensen, and The Amazing Spider- Man 2 scribe Jeff Pinker.

The film, which represents the first step in the plan to bring the story to cinemas (plus a companion TV series which is still in development), will focus on the first novel of eight, 1982’s The Dark Tower: The Gunslinger which would follow Deschain and protégé Jake Chambers as they quest to locate the titular tower, a central point in the universe, before dark forces invade and destroy it, wiping out reality.

So it’s not inconceivable that Sony are hoping for a multi-film franchise from the series that King considers to be his magnum opus.

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Speaking to Entertainment Weekly, the author said: “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.”

Writer/Director Arcel also told EW: “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.”

So what can we expect from the first part of The Dark Tower film series? Well, King has confirmed that the film will start with the very first line of the book: The man in black fled across the desert and the gunslinger followed...

“It should start that way,” he says. “I’ve been pretty insistent about that.”

However, the film itself won’t start at the beginning of the novel or even that it’ll be confide to one novel: “[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 comment on the focus of the film but added: “A lot of it takes place in our day, in the modern world.”

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As for the casting of Idris Elba – a move that has caused some consternation amongst fans of Kings Dark Tower series, director Arcel believes they’ve got the right man for the job: “For me, it just clicked. He’s such a formidable man,” says Arcel. “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.”

As for King himself, he hopes fans will have no problem accepting Elba 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.”

The Dark Tower will start shooting in South Africa in seven weeks, and Sony Pictures plans to have it in theaters on Jan. 13, 2017.

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