Interview: Matt Parker

In this edition of Interview, Last Resort Films president Phil Dolan sits down with writer Matt Parker (Displacement, The Stand) to discuss his return to the studio after several seasons away.

PD: The Stand is your first film since Season 4. What made you decide to come back to work for LRF?

MP: Honestly, life just got in the way. I've had some ideas brewing, but I was always too busy to ever put pen to paper on them. My schedule finally opened up a bit, so I got back to work. Simple as that.

PD: What made you decide to tackle an adaptation of Stephen King's epic novel, The Stand?

MP: It was one of my favorite books growing up. I probably read the thing five times during middle school alone. I re-read it for the first time in several years over the winter, which planted the seed. So much of King's imagery in the novel is incredibly cinematic that I felt it was a shame that it had never made it to the big screen. There was the miniseries from the 90's, which was actually my first introduction to the story as a kid, and they announced another television adaptation after I submitted my pitch to the studio, but once again it's not a proper big screen adaptation.

PD: You've heavily condensed the novel's story into one film. Can you talk about that process?

MP: I felt The Stand should be one film since it is one story with no natural stopping points like It, which has a very natural point at which to break it up to make a second film. When Josh Boone had been talking about writing and directing The Stand, he apparently wanted to make four two-hour films. That just seemed ridiculous to me. And, as much as I love the novel, there is a lot of material, especially throughout the middle sections of the book, that really have very little bearing on the overall story. So I decided to cut out a lot of that material - especially stuff about the development of the Boulder Free Zone - to try to create a tighter, faster moving narrative.

PD: You also just had the first couple episodes of your LRTV show, "Gauntlet," premiere. What can you tell us about your plans for the show?

MP: I'm a big football fan, and always wanted to make a football film for the studio, but it just seemed very daunting to try to tell the story of a team's season over one film. And based on the darker aspects of professional football I wanted to cover, there was no way I was going to avoid comparisons to Oliver Stone's amazing Any Given Sunday. So once LRTV was announced, I felt like I finally had the proper outlet for my idea. I hope the series can continue past its first season since I think it would be fun to follow the team past one season and tackle subjects like the draft and free agency.

PD: What's next for you?

MP: I did write another Stephen King adaptation right around the same time I wrote The Stand, but I also wrote a couple original thrillers that hopefully received better than my last original story for the studio, Displacement. I also plan to continue writing the first season of "Gauntlet" and start thinking up ideas for a possible second season just in case it gets renewed.