Collider: I know you’re a huge Stephen King fan. How surreal is it to then be adapting arguably his best novel?
JOSH BOONE: I mean it’s amazing. I finished writing the script maybe a month ago. Stephen [King] absolutely loved it. It’s, I think, the first script ever approved by him. [It'll be] a single version movie of The Stand. Three hours. It hews very closely to the novel. It was such an amazing process. I’m so familiar with [King's] work and I’ve read so many of his books so many times over the years that it was just a really comfortable thing to be able to work with his material. He gives you so much great material to work with. There’s an abundance of it. So it’s not a book where you have to generate new material and make it work for a movie. He writes so cinematically and his characters are so sharply drawn. You don’t have to change much. [You use] a lot of structural things to condense a thousand pages into a three-hour movie but it’s still at heart his material. I just made it work within the confines of what a single film can be.
Adapting a book of that size would be a herculean feat for anyone, but for a huge fan of the novel, like Josh Boone is, it must be even harder. How do you pick which material is worth keeping and which isn't? He explains to Collider, "I just focused on the things that I felt strongly about, that I have strong memories about, that are evocative to me even when I read it now."
The Stand will take 6 to 8 months of pre-production, but when that prep work is complete Boone tells Collider they might start shooting it "next Spring at the earliest." Don't expect any cast announcements anytime soon as Boone is still meeting with actors and hasn't finalized the budget.