Variety is reporting that Columbia Pictures has acquired rights to remake the UK miniseries Red Riding. The UK miniseries comprising of 3 parts was aired by Channel 4 in March of this year and is due to be released in theatres in the US in the next few months.
The story is an examination of power and police corruption set around the investigation of the disappearance of several young girls. Real crimes, such as the Yorkshire Ripper case, are featured in the story but the scripts are fictionalised and dramatised versions of the events. For the film, the setting will be transferred from Britain to the US.
The studio has bought rights to the mini and the novel series and is reported to be in negotiations with Steve Zaillian to write the script and Ridley Scott to direct. Scott and Zaillian previously collaborated on the films American Gangster and Hannibal. Zaillian has also received an Academy Award for his adaptation of Thomas Keneally’s acclaimed novel Schindler’s Ark. So the talent and the story is there. This could be very good indeed.
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Warner Bros. Pictures has unveiled the trailer and poster for director Martin Campbell’s Edge of Darkness, starring Mel Gibson, Ray Winstone and Danny Huston. The movie is a remake of the 1985 BBC drama series of the same name.
The movie revolves around a veteran cop (Gibson) whose only grown-up child is murdered on the steps of his home. The cop digs into her case and discovers thst his daughter has a secret life, a world of corporate cover-ups and government collusion.
Martin Campbell is best known as the director of GoldenEye and Casino Royale, the two most recent efforts to reboot the James Bond franchise, while screenwriter William Monahan worked on the scripts for Kingdom of Heaven, The Departed and Body of Lies so there is good pedigree in the production.
The movie should be in Irish cinemas for February 19th, 2010.
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Lionsgate has teamed Gus Van Sant and Bret Easton Ellis to write a screenplay based on Vanity Fair’s 2008 article The Golden Suicides. Ellis had previously been announced as the screenwriter for the project, but it is the addition of Van Sant that makes the project that little more interesting.
The original article examines the suicides of so-called ‘golden couple’ Theresa Duncan and Jeremy Blake, who each killed themselves in 2007. Both were incredibly creative people, she was a game designer and filmamker and he was an artist. And both began to show extremely odd behaviour including requesting ‘loyalty oathes’ from their friends. The pair eventually did away with themselves within a week of each other by respectively taking pills and walking into the Atlantic only to never come out.
Ellis knows how to write a tale of influential people gone mad having provided the source material for American Pyscho, while van Sant has a strong history of cataloguing despair and descent in madness having given us To Die For, Elephant and Last Days. Hopefully van Sant will also direct but there’s no word on that as of yet.