The Running Man Director Edgar Wright on Arnold Schwarzenegger Cameo

Twitter was once a place where notable filmmakers offered a piece of themselves in between regimented press tours. Sometimes, they’d answer fan questions, or they’d go back and forth with each other in an effort to provide advice to aspiring filmmakers. And in some instances, one of their tweets would actually lead to collaboration, something Edgar Wright knows firsthand.

In 2017, Wright responded to a random tweet to say that The Running Man is the remake he’d most want to undertake. At 14, he’d read Stephen King’s (as Richard Bachman) 2025-set dystopian novel of the same, but he wasn’t old enough to see the Arnold Schwarzenegger-led adaptation in U.K. cinemas the year prior. Once he finally caught up to Paul Michael Glaser’s 1987 film a couple years later, he realized that King’s book was still largely untapped, thereby hatching his longtime desire to reapproach the source material. Producer Simon Kinberg, remembering Wright’s tweet, then offered him that very opportunity a few years ago.

Reteaming with his Scott Pilgrim vs. the World co-writer, Michael Bacall, the co-writers took their cues from King’s work and positioned their story on Ben Richards, but not the “Butcher of Bakersfield” à la Schwarzenegger’s take. Instead, Ben is a working-class guy whose temperament has cost him the ability to support his struggling family in the film’s corporation-controlled future. So he’s forced to audition for reality television that’s produced by the authoritarian “Network,” and despite his original intent, he’s talked into participating as a “Runner” in their deadliest game show known as The Running Man. If Ben survives the headhunting pursuits of the show’s “Hunters” for 30 days, he can pocket up to $1 billion.

Whenever filmmakers adapt King’s work, they usually admit to being terrified of his response. It’s hard enough that he’s arguably the most celebrated author to ever pen genre fiction, but his famous disapproval of Stanley Kubrick’s adaptation of his 1977 novel, The Shining, inevitably comes to mind. However, being the social butterfly that he is, Wright already had a well-established email relationship with King. 

“21 years ago, Stephen King gave us a press quote for Shaun of the Dead, and it was mind-blowing to me at the time that we got a rave from Stephen King on our poster,” Wright tells The Hollywood Reporter. “I’ve then had this email correspondence with him over the years where he’d always be generous about my movies. But we would mostly email about music. I’d sometimes send him vinyl on his birthday — bands like King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard and Sunflower Bean.”

The conversation eventually turned to Wright’s development of The Running Man, mainly because King had contractual approval over his choice of leading man and any major story changes, such as the ending. Wright and his Ben Richards casting of Glen Powell soon cleared both of those hurdles with flying colors, but there was still overwhelming pressure to now fulfill those expectations on set and in the edit. Fortunately, Wright’s pleasant experience with King only continued.

“The email I got after he watched the movie had the subject heading in all caps. It just said, ‘WOW,’” Wright recalls. “He said lots of nice things about the movie, but then he said, ‘It’s faithful enough to the novel that fans will be happy, but different enough that it kept me excited.’ And I thought, ‘Well, I can’t ask for anything more than that.’”

The mission of the film may have been about honoring the original novel, but Wright still made a point to recognize the cult fans of the 1987 film. It may not be mentioned in the same breath as Schwarzenegger’s more signature films such as Terminator 2, True Lies and Total Recall, but respect is still paid. And as revealed in the marketing, Schwarzenegger even makes a photographic cameo as the presidential face of this near future’s $100 bill. The Easter egg actually has double meaning. It not only acknowledges the actor behind the original Ben Richards, but it’s also a cheeky reference to another sci-fi actioner.

“It’s a shared joke with the Demolition Man universe,” Wright shares. “In Demolition Man, they mention President Schwarzenegger, so it’s my little shout out to both Arnie and [Demolition Man co-screenwriter] Daniel Waters.” 

Below, during a recent conversation with THR, Wright also discusses how his and Powell’s friendship with the Mission: Impossible brain trust inspired The Running Man.

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Every time I talk to you, I always try to pump you for information about your contributions to the Mission: Impossible franchise, which features a running man who sometimes wears disguises in a race against time. So when I found out you were making The Running Man, I theorized that it partially stemmed from you spending so much time under the hood of the Mission movies and wanting to do something with a similar engine. So how right or wrong is this theory?

Yes, I would say it’s partially [right]. I love the genre. What Chris [McQuarrie] and Tom have done in the last three or four movies set a template for modern action. I was actually busy making The Running Man, so the recent one, The Final Reckoning, was the first one that I had not seen an early cut of since Fallout. Chris usually invites me to see an early cut, so I saw early cuts of Fallout and Dead Reckoning, but I didn’t see Final Reckoning until the premiere. 

Glen [Powell] has obviously worked with both Chris and Tom, and he certainly came to this with the same desire as me to do as much stunt work as is safely possible. Glen will probably tell you this as well, but Tom was his first call after he got the role. (Laughs.) “What advice can you give me?” And when I say advice, I literally mean advice for running on camera.

But the real origin story goes much further back? 

Yeah, I read the book when I was about 14, and I read it before I saw the 1987 movie. I was too young to see the 1987 version at the cinema in the U.K. where it was rated 18. And by the time I saw it a couple of years later, I was very aware that the film, whilst really entertaining, was radically different to the book. So even before I was in the business, it always stuck in my head that there was a Stephen King book where large portions of the story were not on screen. That’s why I hesitate to use the word remake with our Running Man because I really think it’s a new adaptation of the same source material. 

The book is a first-person narration, and Ben Richards is in every single scene of our film. You don’t see any scenes or go somewhere else without him, apart from what’s sometimes on the TV. You don’t have any information that he doesn’t also have. As such, the action is very subjective, and hopefully the audience is living vicariously through him in the game. That meant that Glen is front and center of every single action set piece, and we designed them around what he can do. 

As you said, the original film was only a loose adaptation of the book. It also wasn’t a box office smash hit by any means. It has its cult fans, but it really hasn’t had an afterlife like Blade Runner or even Scott Pilgrim vs. the World. Were you even more willing to tackle this because there wasn’t a giant shadow to contend with from the first movie?

It does have a passionate cult following that I’m very aware of, and I would hope that the people who love the 1987 film would love this. But I don’t think that factored into it as much as me knowing that there was a different movie in [the source material]. 

The best remakes of films or the best new adaptations are where you’re doing something radically different with it. David Cronenberg’s The Fly is a great example. It’s wildly different to the 1958 one, but I can enjoy both. When there are remakes that feel like a shot-for-shot remake, I wonder, “Why even bother if you’re just doing the same beats as the other film?” So those movies don’t really interest me, and they feel a bit like karaoke. But this felt like a fresh movie because the source material hadn’t been fully adapted, and most of the characters in the book are not in the 1987 film. 

But that film does have a following, and until you said it, I wasn’t even aware of how that film did. In the ‘80s, nobody really cared about that stuff. There wasn’t social media, and box office wasn’t the subject of fervent discussion within hours of release. Movies were just out. I love John Carpenter’s The Thing and Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, but the fact of how they did or didn’t do didn’t affect my enjoyment of either.

You previously told the story of how Stephen King had to approve Glen Powell’s casting. Does King have this stipulation on all his adaptations? Or is it only on certain titles? 

That is a good question. It might be a more recent thing. When he was starting out, he probably didn’t have those kinds of rights over the material, but I actually don’t know the answer to that. In terms of Glen, I don’t think he was completely aware of everything he’d done. So I was able to point him in the direction of a film that I thought summed up Glen at his best and showed what he could bring to this. That was Richard Linklater’s Hit Man, which Glen co-wrote. So I said to Stephen over email, “You should check out Hit Man.” But it hadn’t come out yet, so the producers got a link for Stephen to watch. And once he saw it, that was the end of that conversation.

The other thing was him having script approval, but my own experience with him has been fantastic. He’s been immensely supportive. Way back, 21 years ago, Stephen King gave us a press quote for Shaun of the Dead, and it was mind-blowing to me at the time that we got a rave from Stephen King on our poster. It was wild. I’ve then had this email correspondence with him over the years where he’d always be generous about my movies. He was really nice about Baby Driver and Last Night in Soho. But we would mostly email about music, and I would send him rock music recommendations. I’d sometimes send him vinyl on his birthday — bands like King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard and Sunflower Bean and other things that I was into. 

But what’s funny is that even though we had each other’s emails, I didn’t email him about Running Man until it was very close to happening. It would’ve been too heartbreaking if the film didn’t end up getting made and I had already gotten in touch with him. I didn’t want to be the boy who cried wolf. So I got in touch with him at the last minute when there was a script about to be potentially green lit, and it was a funny email to send because he must’ve known that I was working on it. 

I sort of said, “As I know you are probably aware, I have been working on The Running Man since early ‘22.” (Laughs.) So he was really, really complimentary about the adaptation, and that’s a blessing and a curse. It’s a blessing, because it’s great that he loved it, but then you have to live up to that. When you’re making a movie, you’re trying to live up to the movie that’s in your head, but now I had to live up to the movie that’s in his head as well. So it definitely added extra pressure in terms of making the movie. It was like, “Ah, I’ve got to deliver for Stephen King.” But it’s a good pressure to have.

Do you recall his reaction to the Michael Cera section of the film?

In terms of the script and the movie, he talked about some specifics, but he mostly just talked about the movie overall. I spoke to him on the phone for the first time after he’d watched it. We’d only emailed over the years, and when he said he was watching it, I said, “Here’s my number. Call me afterwards.” Of course, it was very nerve-wracking knowing he, the original author, was going to watch it. “Oh my God, what is he going to say?” But he emailed me first before he called me, and the email I got after he watched the movie had the subject heading in all caps. It just said, “WOW.” And I thought, “Okay, this is a good start.” 

So it was a really, really nice email, but then he said something in the email that I think is the best reaction you could get from the author. He said lots of nice things about the movie, but then he said, “It’s faithful enough to the novel that fans will be happy, but different enough that it kept me excited.” And I thought, “Well, I can’t ask for anything more than that.”

When I first saw the trailer without knowing the nature of the project, I thought it was saying that Arnold’s Ben Richards became so famous that he’s now the face of currency. But it’s actually President Arnold Schwarzenegger on $100 bills. 

We thought of it as an alternate reality where they changed the rules so people born outside the United States could run for president.

Did you just feel obligated to show people a glimpse of him?

I thought it was a nice little nod [to the ‘87 film]. [Co-writer] Michael Bacall had written the idea about a new currency, “new dollars,” into the script. You only see the Arnold one in closeup, but we did all of the bills with different presidents. And I have to give credit to [screenwriter] Daniel Waters. It’s a shared joke with the Demolition Man universe. In Demolition Man, they mention President Schwarzenegger, so it’s my little shout out to both Arnie and Daniel Waters. 

Who were your Edgar Wrights during post-production? Who gave you valuable feedback in the same way that you do for McQuarrie and other filmmakers? 

Well, I’ve got to say there wasn’t as much feedback as usual because we hadn’t started making this movie a year ago. So I only watched it with the finished picture and sound just over a week ago. I’ve never made a movie that’s been finished this close to the release. When we were at CinemaCon in April, we hadn’t even started editing the movie. And believe me, I’m not complaining at all because this is the greatest job in the world and I’m very grateful to be working. But making this movie is the result of a lot of six- and seven-day weeks in the last year and 16- or 17-hour days. So we didn’t really have that many friends and family screenings at all because we didn’t have the time. Most of the time was spent gearing up to have test screenings, and we had two test screenings.

But I’ve done that before. On Baby Driver, I definitely remember Phil [Lord] and Chris [Miller] and Sam Mendes coming to see the movie. I think Ron Howard came to see the movie at one point as well. But in this case, we just didn’t have time. We would screen it for crew. We would just screen it amongst ourselves. We’d pour over shots and work on it each week so intensely, but you’ve also got to see it as a whole piece. In our editing suite in Soho, there’s a screening room next door, and when we could, we’d show it to the crew so everybody could see it on the big screen, not just on a shot-by-shot basis. So I’d love to say that there was a very starry friends-and-family screening, but there wasn’t time. Chris Macquarie hasn’t even seen it yet. [After this interview, Wright’s vast Rolodex of industry friends showed up for his Oct. 28 special screening, as well as the Nov. 9 premiere in New York.]

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The Running Man opens in movie theaters on Nov. 14.