Martin Sheen plays a maverick politician who becomes the moral focus of a young man who has developed eerie psychic powers during a long coma.

 

During the film shoot at Niagara-on-the-Lake in Canada, Sheen reportedly became the most popular man in town, getting to know the shopkeepers and even the postman. Of his character, he noted that Stillson was the kind of sleazy, immoral, and unprincipled type of politician he would dedicate himself to defeating.