There’s a woman at the beginning who’s a smoker, and he’s talking her out of it. “Sometimes movie people think up things, and you say, ‘I wish I had done that.’ In this movie, Andy becomes a kind of a counselor to try to talk people out of their bad habits. He does note, however, that there’s a rather gory moment from the book he wished stayed in the new film. It’s an inward, powerful performance.”įurthermore, Stephen King enjoyed the way they handled Andy McGee’s powers in the new Firestarter. There’s a lot more authenticity to that performance. They’ve kept the major beats in the story and thank God they got a real Native American to play John Rainbird.

“I read the script beforehand and I thought to myself, okay, what they’ve done here is they have concentrated the story and made it a family story. The legendary horror author also preferred the changes to the script and Michael Greyeyes who played John Rainbird: This character, this iteration of Andy McGee, doesn’t do that. In the original Firestarter movie there’s a lot of, ‘Oh, Charlie, everything’s going to be all right.’ There’s nothing that raises my hackle so much as lying to a child.

“If you compare David Keith as Andy McGee and Zac Efron, I think Efron wins the battle because he seems a lot more intelligent, and he does a lot less lying to the kid, too. His first reason is that he actually likes Zac Efron as Andy McGee, Charlie’s father, more than David Keith from the original film. He revealed as much while speaking with Vanity Fair, and further explained his reasons for preferring the new film. Interestingly, however, Stephen King actually prefers this new Firestarter adaptation to the original. Now the latest adaptation is out – albeit with negative reviews. The original film adaptation was released in 1984 and starred Drew Barrymore as Charlie McGee, a young girl with pyrokinesis. Stephen King’s iconic novel Firestarter has once again been adapted for the big screen.

Stephen king firestarter novel