He would only see the Dark Tower in the Grapefruit (one of thirteen mystical orbs that form an integral part of King's novels) in episode seven. In the pilot, we don't even mention the Dark Tower - Roland's motivated by the Gunslinger Code, not the Dark Tower. And that wasn't how I saw the novels - I saw the novels as a character study.
#The dark tower tv pilot movie#
"That movie was dead on arrival - and we were like 'OK, well we know what not to do.' The movie is a portal movie it's a comic book portal movie. "We were talking to buyers and taking offers just as the movie came out," Mazzara said.
And so we workshopped a pitch, and we shopped it around in the Spring of 2017."Īs they were shopping the pilot to studios, something happened that forced a rethink in their strategy. That pilot was how Roland gets his guns, how he finds Marten (Roland's nemesis, the Man in Black from King's novels) in Gabrielle's room, how he challenges Cort (Roland's mentor) and goes after Marten. They liked that approach, so I took some time off to write a pilot. And when I met with MRC, I said that we'd have to double down on our characters - make it a character journey and have them focus on Roland. But I could see that the trap was that the show could easily be overtaken by the mythology aspect. While I had read some material, I wasn't familiar with the entire epic. They wanted the TV show to focus on the young Roland, and be an origin story. "With what they had done with the film - where they were planning to draw on the adult Roland storyline - they had specified they wanted the TV show to be from 'Wizard and Glass' (the fourth book in the series, which effectively serves as a prequel to earlier novels). "They were looking to do a model where they had a film franchise and a TV franchise operating at the same time," Mazzara said. When 'The Dark Tower' was initially conceived for the small screen, production company MRC was winding up work on the big-screen adaptation directed by Nikolaj Arcel and starring Idris Elba and Matthew McConaughey. I felt the audience would appreciate that level of thoughtfulness." They may have baulked on casting, they may have baulked on some of our choices, but anything I was going to change, I had a reason why. My hope was that the fan base would have appreciated our level of care. "So if Roland (the titular gunslinger, who'd be played by Sam Strike) shoots Gabrielle (Roland's mother, played by Elaine Cassidy) and kills her in the book, then that's what we were going to do. I created a rule that if something happens in the novel, it's canon, and we do our best to honour that canon," Mazzara said "We were always interested in being respectful to the source material.
#The dark tower tv pilot series#
This iconic sentence opens both 'The Gunslinger' (the first of Stephen King's 'The Dark Tower' novels) and the Glen Mazzara-scripted pilot episode of the series for Amazon Prime Video, which, if seen through to fruition, would have tackled the entire saga over the course of seven years. "The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed." while there's some overlap between the two, we hope there's enough different material in both to complement each other) And if you have read 'The Dark Tower' already and want to know more, the tremendous Kingcast has also interviewed Glen Mazzara about 'The Dark Tower'.
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