The Fault in Our Stars Director: The Stand Script Is Finished, Stephen King Approves

The Fault in Our Stars director Josh Boone, not one to be typecast as a director of mid-budget tearjerkers, has already completed the script for his epic Stephen King adaptation The Stand, he told Collider.

The director is just beginning the process of getting the film together and meeting with actors, and says that the movie's elaborate pre-production schedule means it won't be moving forward until at least the spring, but Stephen King is apparently excited about the script.

"I finished writing the script maybe a month ago," Boone said. "Stephen [King] absolutely loved it. It's, I think, the first script ever approved by him. [It'll be] a single version movie of The Stand. Three hours. It hews very closely to the novel. It was such an amazing process. I'm so familiar with [King's] work and I've read so many of his books so many times over the years that it was just a really comfortable thing to be able to work with his material. He gives you so much great material to work with. There's an abundance of it. So it's not a book where you have to generate new material and make it work for a movie. He writes so cinematically and his characters are so sharply drawn. You don't have to change much. [You use] a lot of structural things to condense a thousand pages into a three-hour movie but it's still at heart his material. I just made it work within the confines of what a single film can be."

Of course, just how closely it can adapt the massive novel and still be just one, three-hour movie is anybody's guess. Many fans have been skeptical that the movie can be done "right" in a single installment.