New Photo - The Long Walk director breaks down intense, casualty-heavy uphill sequence: 'The tension really g...

See an exclusive clip and the script pages for one of the most pulsepounding scenes of the Stephen King adaptation. The Long Walk director breaks down intense,

See an exclusive clip and the script pages for one of the most pulse-pounding scenes of the Stephen King adaptation.

The Long Walk director breaks down intense, casualty-heavy uphill sequence: 'The tension really gets ratcheted up' (exclusive)

See an exclusive clip and the script pages for one of the most pulse-pounding scenes of the Stephen King adaptation.

By Nick Romano

Nick Romano

Nick is an entertainment journalist based in New York, NY. If you like pugs and the occasional blurry photo of an action figure, follow him on Twitter @NickARomano.

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September 8, 2025 3:00 p.m. ET

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- Director Francis Lawrence shares an exclusive clip and script pages from *The Long Walk*.

- Lawrence addresses *Hunger Games* comparisons, but says he saw the Stephen King story as "completely different."

- He also shares the movie-making secrets used to make the uphill sequence more intense.

There's a certain *Hunger Games* vibe to *The Long Walk* — or rather, there's a *Long Walk *vibe to the *Hunger Games*, since Stephen King's 1979 novel long predates that Suzanne Collins-penned gladiatorial dystopia (2008).

Both present totalitarian visions of America. Both involve a lethal contest put on for spectacle to exploit the poor. In *The Long Walk*, it's an annual walk in which a group of young men trek cross-country until there's one man left standing. Anyone who falls behind is executed.

There are those participants who safeguard their humanity amid such high stakes (like Cooper Hoffman's Garraty and David Jonsson's McVries) and those who succumb to the temptations of the game (like Charlie Plummer's Barkovitch).

Francis Lawrence, who directed the movie adaptation of* The Long Walk* (out Sep. 12) and installments of *The Hunger Games* films, including the upcoming *Sunrise on the Reaping*, knew people would make comparisons. "But I think of them as completely different kinds of things, and different stories emotionally and different stories thematically," the filmmaker says in an interview for **'s Fall Movie Preview. "The emotional connection and the relationships of the young men is what really hooked me in, was the thing that I really, really leaned into."

The Long Walk (2025) David Jonsson and Cooper Hoffman

David Jonsson as McVries and Cooper Hoffman as Garraty in 'The Long Walk'.

'The Long Walk' cast reveals how much walking the Long Walk really entailed: 'We just kept walking'

David Jonsson in 'The Long Walk'

'The Long Walk' treadmill screening to test viewers with their own long walk

'The Long Walk' cast photographed on the move

Those relationships are tested during a pivotal and severe circumstance, which EW can exclusively preview through a clip from the movie and a peek at the script pages from scribe JT Mollner.

Well into the annual "Long Walk," Garraty slips in and out of consciousness, the lack of sleep bearing down on him. When he snaps out of his sleepwalking fugue, he realizes he fell behind and is now just one warning away from being gunned down. Adding to the drama is the shifting landscape. The men reach a hill, which proves too much for many in the group. Garraty is forced to watch several of his comrades' executions while fighting for his own life with a gun to his head.

"The truth is that this is not a plot-heavy movie, and typically you don't have a protagonist that is being entirely active within that plot," Lawrence explains. "But this sequence is actually one of the only sequences in the movie where the protagonist is being truly, truly active. It's also one of the first times in the movie — I think it's about 40-some minutes into the movie — where the protagonist suddenly has a bunch of warnings and is on the precipice of death himself. So the tension really gets ratcheted up for the first time for our hero, and that was the thing that I was really hyper-focused on."

It's an ensemble scene in the sense that Hoffman's costars are creating the chaos around him. Men tumble into each other, frantically fighting to get back up, while others faint from exhaustion. From the script, Pearson (Thamela Mpumlwana) suffers an asthma attack, the huffing and puffing pulsating the rhythm of the scene. Garraty is forced to slap himself across the face to stay awake as Barkovitch taunts him. Yet, the focus is really on Garraty and McVries, who eventually makes it to his side.**

The Long Walk (2025) David Jonsson and Cooper Hoffman

David Jonsson and Cooper Hoffman in 'The Long Walk'.

To enhance the tension of this sequence, Lawrence took inspiration from a ski trip to Mammoth Mountain in California. He went down an advanced run called the Cornice. Lawrence conquered the path in high school and wanted to prove he could still do it at 55.

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"I went to go take a picture of it," he recalls. "I looked up this advanced run, and I looked at my phone. This thing from here, looking up the hill, it just looks the same as any beginner run. The only way you can really tell how steep something is is by looking across it, not up it or down it."

Lawrence then had to answer for how to sell the uphill sequence in *The Long Walk*: he'd do it in profile.

The production found a hill that wasn't too steep (i.e., wouldn't exhaust his actors). "Then we would sort of Dutch the camera to make the hill look steeper than it was," he says, referring to the classic Dutch camera angle often used to slant the shot. Lawrence and his team also placed mile markers along the hill and angled them forward to further the illusion.

"We did a bunch of little tricks and had the actors kind of lean forward, too, to make everything look steeper," he adds. "So weird story, but yeah, I learned lessons from a ski trip."

See EW's exclusive clip above and script pages below:**

The Long Walk Script