We've been hearing and seeing quite a lot of Nikolaj Arcel's adaptation of Stephen King's THE DARK TOWER over the past week, but it still feels a little unbelievable that the project is actually in the midst of production after all those years of countless delays. We've gotten to see Idris Elba as Roland Deschain, Matthew McConaughey as the Man in Black, and Tom Taylor as Jake Chambers, but the images keep on coming and Entertainment Weekly has the latest crop for the sequel to King's novels.
Roland Deschain, a rough-riding knight who has lost his way, peers off into the horizon in search of the man who decimated his world. The landscapes of South Africa stood in for Mid-World, a dimension ravaged by loss but still bewitching in its tragic beauty.
A boy named Jake Chambers (Tom Taylor) studies sketches he has made of visions and nightmares that are flooding his head. The "shine" that allows him to see these things also allows those who'd like to use his ability as a weapon to sense him.
"Everybody around him thinks he's crazy and he probably even thinks he’s a little bit crazy," says director and co-writer Nikolaj Arcel. "He’s having visions of this big, grand tower that binds everything and holds all the universes together, and he’s having visions of this one man, Roland, the Gunslinger that’s calling out to him."
Production designer Christopher Glass on taking the supernatural premise of "Dutch Hill", one of the portals between the worlds, and adding real physics to it. "We’re trying to have rules, basically, for the way the house becomes a monster, wood shouldn’t suddenly become rubber. It should have particles and fibers and break. And when certain elements are not touching one another, things don’t levitate. Everything has to be touching for it to be alive. Otherwise it just falls, gravity takes over."
Nikolaj Arcel on Roland: "He’s supernatural. He’s a knight of Mid-World. He has fast healing abilities. He’s not that easy to kill, and also, by the way, it’s very hard to get to him. He’s such a formidable fighter, gunslinger, and in battle it’s very hard to best the gunslinger."
Akiva Goldsman on Jake Chambers being the point of entry to the story of THE DARK TOWER: "The single biggest structural conceit is Jake as the point of entry. Doesn’t every kid at one point think that the things in the shadows are real? Doesn’t every little boy imagine that there is a world that you can’t quite see? New York is literally like that. There’s the feeling of a labyrinth behind the face of the city, and I think that’s really consistent with a child’s imagination and the sense of a magical world hiding just beneath the surface."
THE DARK TOWER will hit theaters on February 17, 2017.
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