There's so many things in the various stories... the plots are fairly complex, and the characters interact and they go back and forth. I think Akiva Goldsman, who wrote the screenplay, picked out what seemed to him to be the most accessible and human-relationship kinds of things between this old guy, Roland, who has been around for a long, long time, and the kid. They have wonderful chemistry, and it comes through on the screen.

So yeah, they had to make some decisions. Some of those decisions are related to telling a story that the general public will get. Not just the hardcore Dark Tower fans, the guys who show up at the fantasy conventions with Roland tattooed on their biceps. You have to keep in mind that, of all the books that I've written, the fans of the Dark Tower books and the most zealous, the most fervent ones of them all. But they make a small subgroup of the people who read books like The Shining or Misery, and that sort of thing. They're an acquired taste. They're fantasy.