The Long Walk director Francis Lawrence "wasn't going to buckle" on making an R-rated adaptation and says Stephen King approves of the changes: "To be truthful to the book, it has to be violent, intense, sad"

The Long Walk director Francis Lawrence says it was important to make the upcoming dystopian sci-fi pic as brutal as possible in order to be truthful to the original Stephen King novel.

"I wasn’t going to buckle on that. I knew we were making a tough one. It doesn’t deserve to be PG-13; it deserves to be R," Lawrence says in the new issue of SFX magazine, which features Wednesday season 2 on the cover and hits newsstands on Wednesday, August 13. "Stephen also said it had to be an R. To be truthful to the book, it has to be violent, intense, sad. It has to be a tough watch. Whether supporting the war thematics, the financial nihilism thematics, or the anti-violence thematics, it has to retain that intensity.”

Lawrence also says that King, who always has script approval on his films, was happy with the changes – which are some major plot alterations that we won't reveal just yet. We can say, however, that King approved of the location change: The book takes place in Maine, much like every King novel, but the movie was shot in an area of Manitoba, Canada, with "roads that feel endless." The decision to swap pine trees for a barren location had a bit to do with cost, but it also adds to the desolate and desperate feeling of the dystopian world within the film.

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The film stars Cooper Hoffman as Ray Garraty, a young man who decides to participate in The Long Walk, a contest held by the fascist government that controls the United States. The rules are simple: walk until you die. The last person standing is the winner. The cast includes David Jonsson, Garrett Wareing, Charlie Plummer, Ben Wang, Roman Griffin Davis, and Judy Greer. Lawrence directs from an adapted screenplay penned by JT Mollner.

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The Long Walk hits theaters on September 12. Read more in the latest issue of SFX magazine, which will be available from Wednesday, August 13. Here's Wednesday season 2 cover you need to be looking out for on newsstands below...