“When I came into the studio, I was like, ‘It’s Lord of the Flies meets Lost,’” Ball told us on set between camera set-ups. “That’s basically how I’ve kind of pitched it and they were like, ‘Yep, that’s it.’ So we’ve taken that approach with a lot of hand held, a lot of raw… It’s a kid’s movie with teeth, so it’s cool. It’s a lot of fun to actually play that.”
The Maze Runner is Ball’s feature debut, though he got the job because of a short film he made called “Ruin.” (Watch the film below.) “Ruin” caught the eye of 20th Century Fox’s execs, which Ball was talking to the studio about expanding to a feature -- he describes it as a massive three-movie epic that he wants to make (“My Star Wars basically”) -- when Fox asked him to take a look at The Maze Runner book. Soon he pitched his take on the material, and very quickly he was hired to direct the adaptation.“That was on a Monday morning, so then Tuesday comes about,” he recalls, “Tuesday morning or something I get a call saying, ‘We want you to direct [Maze Runner], but we are going to withhold the offer right now, because we see we have you on the books coming in on Wednesday to pitch “Ruin.”’ I went in and pitched ‘Ruin’ that Wednesday morning and we sold that in the room. So by the end of that Wednesday I had two movies with Fox. It’s crazy. It’s nuts.”
Out on the location, a makeshift village has been built. Animal skulls and totems and bales of hay surround tents and lean-tos made out of straw and sticks. There’s a circle of sand with a rope creating a border. This is the wrestling area, which the Gladers -- residents of the Glade -- surround for a match between Thomas and Gally (Will Poulter). The Gladers vary in age from pre-adolescents to late teens, all male. As an assistant director yells “Picture’s up,” various fires are activated around the scene by the crew, including one flame that must be 15 feet high. Drum music kicks in, as does the wrestling between Thomas and his opponent. As the two actors work through the scene, grabbling with each other, eventually the amnesiac Thomas is prodded into recalling his name. “Welcome to the Glade,” smiles Gally.
“When Thomas gets to the Glade, these people have kind of settled in,” says O'Brien of his character. “They're sort of surviving is what they've settled into. They've built a place to live and they're trying to make it as comfortable for themselves as they can. When Thomas comes in, he's just instinctively not about that. To him, surviving isn't living. They can spend their whole lives in this place, for all they know. But he doesn't want to do that. He doesn't want that for anybody else. He wants to get through to them that he'd rather die than have to spend the rest of his life trapped like a prisoner, which is how he feels. That kind of changes the course of everything. It ironically sort of activates the maze and the Grievers. What he finds in the maze, a key kind of thing… he kills a Griever. It opens all of the doors, and that's when things get crazy.”Oh yes, the Grievers. Those are the unfriendly critters who live within the maze. Producer Wyck Godfrey -- who is no strange to YA adaptations, having produced the Twilight series -- explains that the Grievers have been altered from the way they were depicted in the book.
“In the book it's almost described as a slug like thing, with almost grafted parts -- with everything from saws to spikes to shovels,” Godfrey says. “Which I thought is a little immature, but what Wes loved about it and we all loved about it was that by its nature it was bio-mechanical. It was a biological being that scientists have grafted onto dangerous things. So, we've got something that I think has more of the shape of a giant… almost like a flea? Like if you've seen fleas blown up in huge size? But, it's got these metal legs and stingers. All these kind of dangerous apparatuses on it. They're going to be very scary.”
Walking out into the clearing outside the Gladers’ camp, we can see the walls that meet the tree line surrounding the area. The physical structure as built by the production is about 20 feet high, but in the final film the wall will be more like 100 feet thanks to CGI. The names of the Gladers are scrawled on the wall, though the ones who are no longer with us -- presumably because of their attempts to go beyond the wall into the maze -- have been crossed out. Let’s call them the fallen Maze Runners. And in the middle of the field is the pit that new Gladers come out of upon arrival, rising up on a lift from some mysterious subterranean location. That includes Teresa (Kaya Scodelario), the sole female member of the group.
“It's really cool!” Scodelario jokes about her character’s first scene. “I come up in this box and I open my eyes and there's like 50 boys. It's great! [Laughs] But seriously, she kind of bursts on to the scene and everything starts going wrong from there. It was a lot of fun and it was actually the first scene I shot, so it was good to have that kind of energy. It was terrifying walking onto the set with all of these guys and being the only female and being English and being in America and all of these crazy things. So it was easy to be freaked out by the situation but it went really well.”Interestingly, Teresa and Thomas’ relationship is not what you might expect.
“We have a connection,” says O'Brien. “We kind of just make each other feel safe in a way. It's surprisingly unromantic, but I think that's good. It's so un-cliché in a perfect way. We don't have a kiss at the end of the movie. It's really nice. It's a companionship.”
Teresa is another area where some changes have been made from the book. Godfrey told us that in Dashner’s original novel, Thomas and Teresa share a telepathic connection -- and Teresa spends the early portion of her time in the Glade in a coma.
“Really, I'd say that's the biggest change from the book,” he says. “We talked to James Dashner about it early on. In that in the book, Teresa and Thomas are all of a sudden hearing each other's thoughts. Which, on top of everything else that has happened in the book at that point, was like another kind of, 'Woah, what is this place?' It's not something very visual, that you can see. It's not something that Wes really loved from the book. So we're setting it up so we can carry it on in the second book when it becomes a more prominent feature. We've got some visual things we're doing where those who have read the book and love the book can go, 'Oh, there's some connection happening.’”The producer says that there were so many other things that the filmmakers felt they need to acclimate the audience to that the telepathy/coma stuff had to take a back seat.
“[Like] the fact of the existence of the Glade,” he says. “What is it? Who put us here? Who are we? You know, the idea that they don't have any memories. They don't have any understanding of what's outside the maze. You've got the solving of the puzzle of the maze. The Grievers, which are these creatures that we've never seen before. When Teresa comes up it's already a mystery because she reveals that she is the last one ever [to come into the Glade]. You know, she says, 'Everything is about to change.'”
When asked, Wes Ball says his style as a director is very influenced by Jurassic Park. That was the film that made him want to make movies in the first place, and he also sees his approach to Maze Runner as being influenced by the track Steven Spielberg took with JP.
“It’s fun, but it’s not totally gruesome,” Ball says. “We are doing something really dark here, but there’s not really a lot of blood. It’s totally a PG-13 movie, so a lot of kids are going to go watch this movie. But they’re not going to feel like they are getting talked down to. It’s not a kid’s movie; it’s just a cool movie that kids can go see.”
Of course, you don’t just make movies these days… you make franchises. And so it’s no surprise that The Maze Runner is actually just the first story in a series of books (The Scorch Trials and The Death Cure follow Runner, while The Kill Order is a prequel story.) And the filmmakers are already considering how best to mine the rest of Dashner’s tale onscreen.
“There are things in the second book that we’re considering doing little digital shorts about,” says Godfrey. “Character backstories that you find out in the second book, like Newt’s limp, we’re discussing doing a little short on. Just to get people really thinking about the movie, but we haven’t really decided if we’re going to do it yet.”
But that said, the main goal is to make The Maze Runner its own film first and foremost.
“I think it can stand alone,” says Godfrey. “I mean, honestly I hope it can. I also hope people think it’s a cliffhanger. The reality is that the central question of the movie is, ‘Who are we and how do we get out? What’s out there?’ We answer those questions … There are characters that are lost along the way, and there’s a mystery of what’s out there at the end of the movie. You do come out of it going, ‘Whoa, what happened to the world?’ You don’t answer that question. You just know that the world is different, and changed. So that will be the journey of the second film.”
But first, The Maze Runner comes to theaters on September 19, 2014… Talk to Senior Editor Scott Collura on Twitter at @ScottIGN, on IGN at scottcollura and on Facebook.
