SACHA PFEIFFER, HOST:
Imagine a reality TV show where there's more than money at stake. Every move the players make is watched by drones and a powerful nefarious corporation, and almost everyone the players encounter is trying to kill them. That's the plot of the new movie "The Running Man."
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "THE RUNNING MAN")
JOSH BROLIN: (As Dan Killian) Rules are simple. Survive 30 days with the entire nation hunting you down.
GLEN POWELL: (As Ben Richards) I'm going to come back here and burn this building down. I promise.
PFEIFFER: The film stars Glen Powell. The director and co-writer is Edgar Wright, whose resume includes "Hot Fuzz," "Shaun Of The Dead" and "Baby Driver." Wright's new film is a reboot of the 1987 movie starring Arnold Schwarzenegger. It's based largely on a Stephen King novel from 1982 that imagines a dystopian version of 2025, the year we're in now. Think mass surveillance, rampant inequality, food shortages and a state-controlled media propaganda apparatus. The '80s version of the movie deviated from King's novel, but Edgar Wright sticks closely to it. He thought the futuristic world envisioned by Stephen King might seem eerily familiar to audiences today.
EDGAR WRIGHT: You could do a sci-fi action film where the line between the reality and the fiction part is, like, a bleeding edge at this point. We could set the movie not in a distant future, but in a different tomorrow.
PFEIFFER: I saw this movie with a friend, and afterwards, she said, Is this movie trying to entertain us? Is it trying to scare us, or is it trying to warn us? How would you answer her question?
WRIGHT: I'd say a beautiful combination of all three.
(LAUGHTER)
WRIGHT: I think what's hopefully powerful about the movie is it takes place in a reality that's not so far away from where we are now. And there's no technology that exists in the movie that doesn't exist in some form now. I guess it's more that in the world that we've created, people are much more matter-of-fact about what they're seeing. Like, there are these rover drones that are omnipresent, that are like vultures as soon as, like, death is near.
PFEIFFER: Yeah, these balls floating in the air that film everything.
WRIGHT: Yes, exactly. And they're so commonplace that people barely look at them because it's just - at this point, it's just an everyday occurrence. And I think what was really fun about it was that there were elements of - in the book which are extremely prescient that we could take the ball and run with them. There is a scene in the book where Ben Richards makes one of his tapes to go on the show. But what actually goes out on air has been completely manipulated, so he's saying something completely different. And obviously, we have a certain type of reality TV in this millennium where people are aware of, like, what can happen to the members of the public who go on those shows and are made to be, like, a pantomime villain of sorts or a national laughingstock.
PFEIFFER: Yeah.
WRIGHT: And, you know, a lot of members of the public are not equipped to handle that kind of infamy. And so, you know, what you can say about the - sort of the fame game, you know, that you were thrust into, unwittingly or not, was something that was really exciting to explore in this.
PFEIFFER: You've mentioned reality TV a few times. That's obviously a big part of this movie. The show, the running man game, is reality television. There are many other aspects of reality TV throughout it. I'm wondering where you personally come down on reality TV. Are you a watcher?
WRIGHT: I think over the years, you start to become aware of how, you know, the sausage is made and what's kind of going on behind the scenes and how much editing is done by the producers to create narratives about these contestants and whether it's something like Big Brother, which, you know, it's in the title to be Orwellian. But even in singing competitions or baking competitions, dancing competitions, there's a lot of scandal and intrigue, and I find it fascinating, but also I think it's somewhat disturbing because I think producers of those shows probably play fast and loose with the lives and the mental health of the contestants sometimes.
PFEIFFER: Yeah. I want to go back to the world that your movie portrays. It shows a lot of public anger and outrage and political and societal divisions and massive gap between rich and poor, a lot of discomfort over the rapid development of technology and its uses like surveillance. Again, if this had been the '80s when the novel came out and the original movie came out, that's one thing. So much of this closely parallels our world today that I'm wondering whether you think the public will find this entertaining, whether they'll feel unsettled by it.
WRIGHT: I mean, I think the best of genre and dystopian fiction, for that matter, is to hold up a funhouse mirror to reality. And sometimes, you know, going to see a movie is you get to experience something that doesn't happen in real life, and sometimes things are uncomfortably close to the bone, and I think this is probably more of the latter. But if the net result is it's an entertaining sci-fi action film that gives you plenty to chew on, then I say, great.
PFEIFFER: The original movie had Arnold Schwarzenegger in the main role. This time, it's Glen Powell, another, you know, muscly guy that we get to see shirtless in a towel for part of one scene. I'm wondering how you would compare the way the role Arnold Schwarzenegger played it to the way Glen Powell plays it.
WRIGHT: Well, I think what's different - and this goes for the novel and the film - is that Ben Richards in our film is much more of an everyman.
PFEIFFER: This is the protagonist.
WRIGHT: Yeah, Glen Powell plays Ben Richards, the protagonist. In the 1987 film, he's a military policeman, and so there's a feeling that he's already an action hero at the start of the movie, even before he's gone on the game. In this, Glen is playing an out-of-work dad, and, you know, he's tough because he works in construction, so he's got a thick hide, but he's not a trained killer, and he's not a superspy. He's not a superhero, basically. He's an out-of-work dad who's struggling to provide for his family.
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "THE RUNNING MAN")
JAYME LAWSON: (As Sheila Richards) People on these games never come back.
POWELL: (As Ben Richards) We have no choice. We need money for a doctor now.
PFEIFFER: Without giving any spoilers, you are much more faithful to the book than the original movie was, but you still changed the ending quite a bit. Why did you decide to do it?
WRIGHT: Yeah. Well, I think anybody who's read the book will know that there are some uncomfortable, real-life parallels to the ending of the book. And I was actually really encouraged by the fact that when Stephen King read the adaptation, that he was really pleased that we changed the ending as well and thought we'd done a really good job of keeping the same fire and spirit of it but by doing something not quite as bleak as the book ending.
PFEIFFER: There's so much of this movie that - it basically shows a zombified general public. And I feel this way when I'm sitting on the subway and watching people buried in their phones. And it feels a bit like there's a warning here about what we've become, and can we reverse it? Does that feel like that at all to you?
WRIGHT: Yeah, I mean, without getting into kind of how the movie ends, I think that you could sort of simplify it to say it's a film about turning your phones off and talking to each other.
(LAUGHTER)
PFEIFFER: That's a great note to end on.
WRIGHT: I mean, definitely turn your phone off during the movie, as well.
PFEIFFER: (Laughter) That's Edgar Wright. He's director and co-writer of the new film "The Running Man," a remake of the previous "Running Man." It's in theaters now. Edgar, thank you much for talking about this.
WRIGHT: Thanks so much.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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