Maze Runner: The Scorch Trials Set Visit

A visit to the Maze Runner: The Scorch Trials set in New Mexico

Maze Runner: The Scorch Trials, coming to theaters this fall, is the sequel to The Maze Runner, the first film based on the post-apocalyptic dystopian young adult book series by James Dashner. In the first film, a young man named Thomas (Dylan O’Brien) wakes up in an elevator that takes him to the Glade, a secluded area behind a maze where he lives with a group of boys. Runners try to get through the maze when it opens to find their way to freedom, to no avail. When a young woman named Teresa (Kaya Scodelario) appears, the first female there, everything starts to fall apart. Some of the group is rescued by rebels and removed from the Glade. As it turns out, that isn’t the end of the story. 

ComingSoon.net got a chance to visit the Maze Runner: The Scorch Trials set in Albuquerque, New Mexico where we got to interview the cast and check out the set and watch a few scenes being shot, including one with Alan Tudyk, who hasn’t been announced as a cast member yet. The first scene took place in a dilapidated mansion out in the Scorch, a desolate landscape the group has escaped to. It’s a rave, where our heroes find themselves under the influence of an unnamed drug. Director Wes Ball told us, “We’re just trying to make something interesting and kind of creepy, but sexual in some strange way. And, you know, a little bit more kind of fitting with this the vibe of the movie in general just a little bit more mature and sophisticated and growing up a little bit with these kids. So, you know, just taking that approach with it basically. Doing something that hopefully we haven’t quite seen before. You know, so that’s the challenge really is just to make something kind of new and different.”

The scene has Thomas almost kissing a new character (and book fan favorite) Brenda (Rosa Salazar). Brenda is a part of the crew of Cranks, along with Giancarlo Esposito’s Jorge. Salazar described Brenda and how close the scene is to the one in the book. “Well, first of all, she kicks ass, and she’s no bulls***. That scene is so close to the book that it’s fun,” Salazar said. “She’s like, forward and goes in to kiss him and he’s like, no, I don’t understand. That’s her. She’s like, leap now. Just go. I sort of like to describe her as a rescue dog. She was thrust out into this terrible world, the Scorch, and fending for herself at a very young age. Jorge finds her and takes her under his wing, and she becomes a protege. But she’s very armored. She’s very, you’re not getting in here. There are no chinks in her armor. She’s impenetrable. Throughout that course of the movie, stuff is getting pulled out of her. She’s like, I’m vulnerable now. What does this mean. She breaks her own rules with this character Thomas and lets him in in this really beautiful way and is sort of messed up by it, because she’s so used to doing this, so to do this is very awkward. It’s nice to see that.”

In the scene, after a drug-addled Brenda tries to kiss Thomas, he says, “You’re not her.” Ouch. O’Brien explained that it’s not really about the romance as much as it is the connection between the characters. “Yeah. In this one, it’s not a love triangle and… everything I love about this story line is that it’s sort of so unromantic and that’s what makes it so romantic. There really is no romance going on. There’s kind of just something there, connections there for the audience to root for and I think that’s stronger without just throwing it in your face. I always like to cultivate that stuff myself as a viewer, you know, like I want [people to be like] ‘Oh! They’re amazing together.’

“In this movie … In the first one, Thomas and Teresa, what I love about their relationship is that it’s a connection. It’s familiar in a world that’s completely unfamiliar to these kids. Literally just being like re-birthed essentially. They to one another are the one piece of memory that they have and it makes me feel safe, and I think that’s beautiful. It’s not necessarily like stop and kissing in the woods, that never happens, and that’s what I love too, it’s so authentic. 

“We really want to make it real, because these kids are in the situation where they’ll never be just like making out. They’re trying to survive and that’s the other beauty of the story. It gets tossed aside without being tossed aside, it’s still really present and it’s still really there and again, something for the audience to grab on to and root for and love.” O’Brien also said he’s read ahead in the books and knows what’s coming, unlike many of the rest of the cast. He says we’ll see the infamous “nose scene” in the film as well. 

Thomas Brodie-Sangster, who plays fan favorite Newt, told us that he worked really hard to deal with running on the dunes in the film, especially with that Newt limp. He said, “I did okay, I did all right. There was one time when I went up to the top and just had to sit down for a good 20 minutes just to catch my breath and just get oxygen into my brain. It was pretty hard , pretty tough just running up and you don’t really go anywhere so you really have to work hard to get somewhere.” That limp disappears for a bit, of course. “I sort of decided that Newt doesn’t have a limp when running up sand dunes. It is actually a very hard thing to do, I tried it and it just looks like I am struggling and just being weird. I just thought I should get up the sand dune,” he laughed.

Brodie-Sangster said that he thinks fans are most excited to see how the Cranks (those people infected by the Flare) look. “I suppose it’s not too far off really, they are pretty messed up looking things, they are quite scary. Which I think is great, our bad guys in the last one were grievers which were terrifying, but these are people, or were people, and they are pretty terrifying. The first day we saw them it was pretty spectacular.”

Dexter Darden, who plays Frypan, the cook of the group, talked about coming back for a second film. “I was excited to come back and just be filming with my castmates again,” he said. “We see each other all the time when we’re not working, so we’ve really developed this solid family and friendship, so being able to come back with them and kind of create a new movie and a new opportunity with them was awesome. But for Frypan, it was kind of cool, because he grows a lot in this movie. As people who have read the book or book series know, Frypan kind of gains a little bit more of an identity in the group and kind of assumes a new position and role, and I was excited to take that challenge on and it’s been fun, it’s been great.”

Darden is also in the scene with Tudyk, and talked about working with him and getting to punch him. “He’s brilliant. One of the funniest guys I’ve ever met in my life, so being able to kind of punch him has definitely checked off my bucket list,” he laughed. The scene involved Jorge and the gang holding Tudyk’s character after discovering that he’s the ringleader of the drug party, which WICKED uses to trap and kidnap children. We see him tied to a chair and punched until his chair falls back, something we got to watch a number of times. Tudyk’s makeup and super-fancy outfit in the interview room was pretty spectacular.

Tudyk plays Blondie, who as he puts it, “is really stylin’ while he does drugs and kidnaps children.” He said they let him create his character’s look. “I was like, ‘I want a bunch of chains. Can I wear a bunch of jewelry?’ ‘Sure, why not? It doesn’t matter.’ You can do whatever because he’s such a unique individual. I could have a band-aid on every finger with no explanation of why I have a band-aid and a ferret that I pet. You can put anything on this guy and it’s like, ‘Yeah okay, that works.’ Those types of people are a blast, because you’re not trying to stay within, the parameters are wide open, you can go crazy.”

We asked him what kind of crazy he was, and he laughed, “He’s a capitalist. The worst kind. The scene that we are shooting today is – obviously I get beaten up, because I have been selling off the kids that I’m able to catch in the web of my dance club, selling them off to WICKED and in this scene I explain, its supply and demand, it’s how it goes, I’ve got to get by some way and this is how I do it. Somebody else would do it if it wasn’t me, it’s a capitalist [thing].

He also described the drug that he’s giving the kids. “It’s some future drink, it looks like Listerine or something like that, but I’m pretty sure it’s much worse. It’s a hallucinogen, it’s a euphoric drug, we just see the effects of it and it also knocks you out, it knocks you out so that WICKED can come in and take you.”

We talked to Scodelario about her closeness with the cast, something that everyone, including the newcomers, counted as their favorite part of the film. The entire cast talked about cooking together and playing Mario Kart non-stop. Scodelario told us she’s playing Teresa “sadder” this time. “She’s very singular and very alone, but I like that, ya know. It would have been easy for us to just make her a follower and just make her agree with everything and go along with it. I like that, she’s very much separated. She’s physically there, we’ve kind of changed that from the book, she’s on the journey with them, but her mind is elsewhere and her thought process and what she wants to do is very different from them all. And she doesn’t really have anyone to share that with, none of them do. These kids have been kind of thrust together. So it’s been, as an actor, it’s been kind of more, it’s been a lot lonelier, but I like to play with that. You know, life isn’t rainbows and fairy tales.”

Ki Hong Lee, who plays Minho, told us about the changes in playing the fastest runner this time around. “You know the first one I think was more about establishing Minho as the runner, the leader of the runners and things like that, but this time around it’s sort of… well, the first one you know Minho is kind of like one of the leaders, but he takes his cue off of Alby (Aml Ameen), but now Alby is gone and now he is taking his cue from Newt and Thomas. So it’s interesting to kind of see that shift in his focus of leadership, so his role now is more sort of just making sure everyone is okay and protecting everybody. Making sure, you know, there is always a way out of a situation because you know we, we always get stuck in these bad situations, and so you’ll see a different side of him. In the first one we all tried to kind of input as much sassiness and kind of a sarcastic attitude because that is what is so good about the books and about what James has written, so we tried to do that, but some of it got cut. So this time I am trying to put in as much of it as I can, so hopefully some of that ends up being in the final.”

Ball said he’s bringing a few of the characters from the third book in a bit early. “Yeah, I mean, that’s kind of our approach on it, so I don’t wanna get into too much of the details about what we’re doing there, but the way we’re approaching this now that we’ve kind of we’ve got our first one and fortunately it kind of worked out, so we could make the next ones, it’s not as easy to take that second book and just do a straight adaptation. It just doesn’t, it won’t work basically.  So what our approach is basically to take the rest of his story, the rest of his saga basically and find the two movies in that. And that required basically some things to come from the third book come into the second and the second into the third. And make that nice, linear trajectory of a nice, cohesive story that’s all building to one finale, you know, in the next one hopefully. So that’s kind of our approach and that means some characters have to come in, we have to set up certain things that are only in the last bit of the third book. We’re bringing them in now kind of starting to sprinkle them in. So like I said, there’s that nice, it all feels like a one cohesive thing, you know what I mean? So that’s been a little bit of the challenge I think, just to kind of find that balance ’cause the fans are very, very important to us obviously and we don’t wanna disappoint them. But at the same time, you know, let’s look at the last one, you had to make some tweaks and changes to make a good movie. So that’s our goal.”

Maze Runner: The Scorch Trials will hit theaters on September 18.