In anticipation of the Blu-ray release of The Fault in Our Stars, Collider caught up with director Josh Boone about his looming adaptation of Stephen King’s The Stand.

The latest on the long gestating project is that a script is now completed, and King approved.

I finished writing the script maybe a month ago. Stephen [King] absolutely loved it. It’s, I think, the first script ever approved by him.

[It'll be] a single version movie of The Stand. Three hours. It hews very closely to the novel.

It was such an amazing process. I’m so familiar with [King's] work and I’ve read so many of his books so many times over the years that it was just a really comfortable thing to be able to work with his material. He gives you so much great material to work with. There’s an abundance of it. So it’s not a book where you have to generate new material and make it work for a movie. He writes so cinematically and his characters are so sharply drawn. You don’t have to change much. [You use] a lot of structural things to condense a thousand pages into a three-hour movie but it’s still at heart his material. I just made it work within the confines of what a single film can be.

Fans of the novel understand its great wealth of arcs and ideas, which is why it couldn’t all make it into the script. Boone explains his process for choosing:

‘The Stand’ is about so many things — you could make ten to fifteen different movies and focus on a different aspect of it. I just focussed on the things that were more important to me and felt essential to me and were based in the characters.

But don’t expect cameras to roll anytime soon, he says it takes a long time to prep a film like that. Six to eight months even. Expect some news early in the New Year.

Rumors already have Matthew McConaughey pegged for the role of Randall Flag, the personification of evil, a demonic figure who wreaks havoc after a plague kills most of the population.