This is based on one of Stephen King's novels under his pseudonym, Richard Bachman.
Mark Hamill said that when director Francis Lawrence approached him about playing the part of the Major, it immediately evoked his teenage years in Japan, where he went to school next to a U.S. military base. "I said, 'I know who this guy is: I've seen him firsthand,'" Hamill said. "I'd walk across the parking lot, seeing the officers putting these guys through their paces in blazing hot sun, and they were just brutal. Like if you vomit, they force you to eat it. It's horrible."
In the mid 2000's, Frank Darabont bought the rights for novel, intending to make the film but, after many years of no progress, the rights lapsed.
Mark Hamill said that around 2019, he decided he wanted to step away from acting on camera.
"I thought this stage in my career, I'd be spending more time with a metal detector, wandering around the beach, playing with the dogs in the backyard," Hamill said. "I said to my agent, 'You know what? I'm not motivated anymore. I think I'm gonna just sort of retire and just do voice over.' And the only people that rejected were my agent and my wife, because, you know, it's good to have me out of the house." He credited filmmaker Mike Flanagan for reviving his career by casting him in his Netflix series "The Fall of the House of Usher." "That would have been a routine character for voice over, but to play an amoral, sociopathic lawyer, just pure evil - never on camera," he said. Flanagan then cast Hamill as an alcoholic accountant and grandfather of the title character.
Screenwriter JT Mollner discussed how happy he was to keep the "heavy, exciting, terrifying themes" of Stephen King's novel. "We so wanted to make sure we had the beauty and love in the story of friendship - and also the brutality, hopelessness and terror," he said. "I'm very, very grateful that we could keep the teeth that the book has."
That's as far as anyone in the panel addressed the film's parallels to the current dire state of American democracy. Instead, in a taped segment, Lawrence and actor Ben Wang discussed how the grueling nature of the shoot, in which the actors walked for miles on a Canadian highway, created a strong connection between the cast.
"We shot this movie chronologically," Director Francis Lawrence said. "So as everybody got together and met for the first time [in the movie], you as actors were meeting for the first time and becoming friends, and then going on this experience together. The physicality of this job of walking sometimes 30,000 steps a day doing these very, very long takes, I think created a bond."