How do you adapt a six-page story into a feature-length film?

If Richard Kelly’s upcoming The Box is any indication, the first step is having an unbeatable premise. And the second? As the old saying goes, write what you know.

Richard Matheson’s 1970 short story “Button, Button” — the inspiration for The Box — was sparse but engrossing: A box with a glass dome, underneath which is a red button, arrives on the doorstep of New Yorkers Arthur and Norma Lewis. It’s followed by the mysterious Mr. Steward, who offers them $50,000 if they press the button.

The kicker is, once they press that red button, someone they don’t know will die.

The moral question raised by “Button, Button” — whether material gain is worth the consequences, especially if we never see the effects of those consequences — seems especially prescient given our current climate, when executives get million-dollar bonuses after driving companies into the ground.

But Kelly, who said he spent years trying to adapt the short story, said his screenplay will also track the origin of the little wooden box, and give Arthur and Norma a chance at redemption.

“Are they next?” Kelly said in an interview last month. “Can they survive this? Can they uncover the truth and can they redeem themselves and save themselves perhaps? For me, that became the jumping off point. Maybe expanded into a feature where there’s a way to present the setup from the short story. It felt like it could be the first act of an entire film, and it felt like something that was sort of asking to be resolved, in my mind. But resolved in a way that hopefully was still very faithful to the spirit of what I believe that Matheson was kind of trying to say in a nutshell: That the pushing of the button… it’s the key to the downfall of man.”

Marsden and Diaz in a scene from ‘The Box’.
SCI FI Wire reports Kelly changed a few things from Matheson’s story. The location has been moved (although the mid-1970’s time period remains the same) and Mr. Steward’s offer has been upgraded to $1 million.

Also, in seeking a way to flesh out Matheson’s story, Kelly mixed in some of his own personal history: the character of Arthur works at NASA, as did Kelly’s father; Norma, like Kelly’s own mother, is a schoolteacher from Texas. To get the details right, the film’s stars, Cameron Diaz and James Marsden, spent time with Kelly’s parents.

“Even though it’s the first film I’ve done that’s based on someone else’s origin material, it is my most personal film, because when you read the short story, Arthur and Norma, it’s only six pages, so there’s not much time to delve into their backstory and who they are,” Kelly said. “And I decided, since I’m setting this in 1976, and I’m setting it in Richmond, Va., where I grew up, I thought, ‘How am I going to flesh out Arthur and Norma?’ And then my instinct was, ‘Why don’t I base them on my parents?’”

Kelly also gave Arthur and Norma a son, whom he admitted, “is kind of me.”

“I had an older brother, so I wasn’t a single child, and I was barely 1 year old in 1976, but the kid is 10 or 11, so it became all of a sudden this really personal thing. It become a way for me to sort of expand and interpret Matheson’s story, but also make it very personal to me.”

The Box opens in theaters on Oct. 30.

Source: CinemaSpy.com