Josh Boone is a director with his hands in many pots. The Fault in Our Stars helmer is writing and directing the upcoming X-Men: The New Mutants movie. He’s working on a film adaptation of Revival, the Stephen King novel. And that’s without even mentioning projects like The Stand or Pretenders. Basically, the guy has a lot of cool stuff going on.
Boone chatted with Creative Screenwriting about New Mutants and Revival, and the differences between adapting a big budget story vs. writing something smaller. Here are the highlights from the interview.
'X-Men: The New Mutants' Script
Boone is currently hard at work on prep for the New Mutants movie, which is expected to start filming in Montreal in May. With a reportedly YA tone and featuring the mutants Wolfsbane, Magik, Sunspot, Danielle Moonstar, Mirage, and Cannonball, Boone is getting a chance to adapt yet another story he loved as a child.
Boone spoke to Creative Screenwriting about which New Mutants comics he and co-writer/childhood friend Knate Gwaltney specifically loved as a kid, and what he and Gwaltney did to convince Simon Kinsberg that a New Mutants film adaptation made sense:
We had loved this X-Men spinoff, The New Mutants. We had loved Bill Sienkiewicz’s run with Chris Claremont that had Demon Bear. It was really dark, interesting, and different from the typical X-Men stories that we had read.
After I made The Fault in Our Stars, we made Fox a comic book. It walked them through a trilogy of New Mutant films that would build on each other. We used this program called Comic Life, and took all the images we had loved from the series and strung them together to show them the movie we wanted to do.
We brought it to Simon and he really liked it. We’ve been going for the past year and a half to get it ready, and I’m about to go location scout and we have a release date now.
Comparing the process of writing a big-budget movie like New Mutants versus the process of writing a movie like Revival, Boone said: “It’s a balance of getting to do things in a bubble, which I’d say if the best way of writing anything, and then having to negotiate all the politics of studio filmmaking, which is its own special beast.”
Boone explains that he wrote “a few drafts” of the New Mutants script before bringing in Scott Neustadter and Mike Weber (The Fault in Our Stars) to do a draft. Boone expects that the script “will never be done until we’re done shooting.”
Russell Crowe to Star in 'Revival'
Boone dropped the news that Russell Crowe is attached to star in his adaptation of Revival, based on the Stephen King novel of the same name. Boone has plans to direct Revival once he has wrapped up work on The New Mutants.
Boone described the process of writing the screenplay for the film as writing in “a very pleasant bubble,” adding:
I wrote Revival it in a bubble in a month, did a rewrite a few months later that took two weeks, and haven’t touched it since. We just went and put the money and cast together. It’s certainly the better way to do it, but to get the opportunity to do these big properties you have to go through a much longer process to get to the same end result.
The writer/director has “a good relationship” with King, who is not only one of his favorite childhood authors, but who cameo-ed in Boone’s Stuck in Love. “When I wanted to adapt his novel Revival I really just went and asked him,” Boone said.
Boone is also in the process of adapting King’s The Stand, which he describes as a much longer process “because it’s such an expensive movie.”
Speaking more generally about the appeal of King’s stories, Boone said:
For me, Stephen King is the Great American Storyteller in the way he’s able to do what he does so beautifully. The trick that he knew that nobody else really knew as well as him, was that if he established his characters credibly and made you believe that they lived in the same world that you lived in, but then slowly started to introduce supernatural elements, you would swallow the whole thing.
Boone said that he’s “trying to pioneer and champion doing prestige versions of horror films,” adding:
We’re really trying to pioneer and champion doing prestige versions of horror films. That’s the idea with all these projects – to take these authors and elevate their work as high as we possibly can. I guess it’s a ‘Thank you’ for having such a strong grasp on my imagination when I was young.
