The Long Walk director Francis Lawrence "wasn't going to buckle" on making an R-rated adaptation and says Stephen King approves of the changes: "To be truthful to the book, it has to be violent, intense, sad"

The Long Walk.

The Long Walk director Francis Lawrence says it was important to make the upcoming dystopian sci-fi pic as brutal as possible in order to be truthful to the original Stephen King novel.

"I wasn’t going to buckle on that. I knew we were making a tough one. It doesn’t deserve to be PG-13; it deserves to be R," Lawrence says in the new issue of SFX magazine, which features Wednesday season 2 on the cover and hits newsstands on Wednesday, August 13. "Stephen also said it had to be an R. To be truthful to the book, it has to be violent, intense, sad. It has to be a tough watch. Whether supporting the war thematics, the financial nihilism thematics, or the anti-violence thematics, it has to retain that intensity.”