In a recent interview with EW, director, Wes Ball, talks about designing the maze for The Maze Runner and having to make adjustments while staying true to James Dasnher’s vision.
Ball wholeheartedly embraced the challenge of crafting a maze that was as real as possible. “I wanted to make it feel like it was believable, that it wasn’t just magic,” he says. “This isn’t a Harry Potter maze. We tried to ground it in as much reality as we could.”
He started with the height of the walls. “In the books he says they’re 400 feet. When I started doing my pre-vis stuff, I could design walls that were 400 feet, but what I found was, if they were 400 feet, you couldn’t fit them in the frame. It wasn’t an interesting shot,” he says. “We ended up in that zone of 100 to 150 feet, which felt massive enough that you felt like you were in a prison, but they weren’t so big that it was like we were looking at concrete the whole movie.” The maze, he says, is made more threatening, more imposing by being aware of the tops of the walls.
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