STACK #124 Feb 2016

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B ringing a young adult bestseller to the big screen is a balancing act. It has to stand up in its own right as a film, whether you know the book or not. On the other hand, fans of the original printed version tend to be fiercely protective, and if they don’t approve, then the movie may become a box office disaster. Wes Ball, whose only previous directorial effort was a seven-minute CGI animated short entitled Ruin , was certainly very conscious that it was important followers of James Dashner’s bestselling trilogy The Maze Runner would give the thumbs up to the film version. “I thought the first script I read was good, but it was a bit too far away from the book,” admits Ball. “So we brought in two writers and kept working on it, to bring it closer to the book, because I thought that was important. That was our fan base, that was where we started from. So we tried to take it back to that initial source material, while changing what we had to along the way to make sure it was a movie that could stand on its own. That’s the balance – what you can keep, and what you can’t.” First published in 2009, The Maze Runner follows the adventures of a young teenager named Thomas (played by Dylan O’Brien), who wakes up to find himself among a colony of boys in The Glade, a large open expanse surrounded by enormous concrete walls. He and his fellow ‘Gladers’ don’t know how or

franchise – a sequel is already in production – an impressive achievement given that Ball was working with a much smaller budget; in fact, he shot it in just eight weeks. However, he believes that actually worked in its favour. “We were a very small movie,” according to Ball. “We didn’t have the resources other movies like ours have, in terms of time and money, so we had to have character, and intensity and suspense. “In a way, the schedule contributed to the movie. I’d say to the cast members, ‘all right guys, we’ve got three hours to shoot this scene’ and they’re on it. ‘Okay, let’s do this.’ We all joined together to get this thing done, and there’s something interesting in that limitation, it forces out some good choices.” Initial feedback suggests that fans of the book were pleased with the way The Maze Runner has turned out. “James wrote this book in 2009, even before Hunger Games , so there have been fans of this book for a long time,” Ball notes. “Thankfully, they’ve been really nice to us from the start. They’ve enjoyed the casting decisions and given us the thumbs-up. We

why they got there, only that each of them has a role to play, whether it be gardening and construction or being one of the elite runners who map the walls of the Maze that keeps them captive. As well as keeping fans of the book happy, Ball also knew that his debut feature would inevitably draw comparisons with other hit dystopian franchises aimed at young teenage audiences. “I was very aware of The Hunger Games and Divergent, though of course Divergent hadn’t even come out when we were making this movie,” he says. “I knew we didn’t have some of the same ingredients, we didn’t have the love triangle, we didn’t have the oppressive government in this first movie. This was basically a really cool adventure, with these fun situations around it. A little bit of a monster movie in there, too. Hopefully people will give it a shot and see it’s different to what they’ve seen before.” With a worldwide box office gross of more than $350 million, The Maze Runner is on track to become another lucrative teen

can’t just get by on the original fans, we need new fans too, but it was important for us to respect the fans of the book who have been waiting for this movie for so long.”

• The Maze Runner is out now

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