STACK Feb Issue 124

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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
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
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
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