We feel like if you don’t like at least one David Gordon Green film there has to be something wrong. The one-time-wunderkind”s had a diverse and prolific career, ranging from gentle indie debut “George Washington” to lyrical love story “All The Real Girls” to thrillerish melodrama with “Snow Angels” and “Undertow” to dark comedy with “Eastbound & Down” to blockbuster comedy with “Pineapple Express” to bonkers stoner fantasy comedy with “Your Highness” to low-key dramedy with the currently-in-theaters “Prince Avalanche.” But despite a few promises, we’ve barely seen the director’s dark side (though that may be about to change, with the Venice-bound “Joe“).
We nearly did a year or two back, with the filmmaker’s long-gestating “Suspiria” remake, but financing fell apart for the film at the last. From what the filmmaker tells Esquire in a recent interview, it sounded promising, with Gordon Green saying “Someone needs to do something very artful with that project. I’m just excited at the thought of making something elegant, and graphic, and classy at a point in the horror genre where everybody’s making films raw, and found-footage. I want something to contrast that, but anybody that’s interested in horror movies has no interest in that right now. At least, not with my involvement. But maybe someone else will do it.”
The filmmaker says that he’d still be up for making the project, saying “I’ve got the whole movie in my head. It’s ready to go, but it just costs too much. My version of it costs too much.” And he emphasizes that his version would be faithful, but with a slightly different spin to Dario Argento‘s original. “It would be very respectful of the original film,” he says. “It’s like the restaging of an opera. It’s not there to take away from what exists, but to be inspired by what it is, and make something that is its own unique experience, just like “Prince Avalanche.” Very unique but very respectful. It’s no different than taking a book that people like and making a movie version of it. It’s adapting something that exists. Is it the most original thing in the world to do? No. It gives you a framework of inspiration. So if you’re excited about it, I’d like to see someone else’s version of remaking “Prince Avalanche” [itself a remake of an Icelandic film]. I think it would be amazing to see a Korean version of “Prince Avalanche” as a serial-killer movie.”
That aside, Gordon Green says he’s not totally done with the genre as he’s mulling over the idea of teaming up with one of his old film school compatriots. “[‘Compliance‘ director Craig Zobel] just wrote a horror film I was reading, and was thinking of making. It’s pretty creepy, and really cool. So we’re bouncing ideas around with that, and a few other disturbing things we’ve been delving into. There are a lot of good movies to make. My problem is I’m only one person. That’s why it’s great that now a lot of my buddies are kind of getting into it. They’re like, “Okay, you go make this one, and I’ll make that one.” It’s fun to be able to pass the torch and have something I get to watch.”
Whether Gordon Green, Zobel, or one of their other pals end up making the film, it’s clear that we’re entering a darker period of the director’s work, with “Joe” and the Al Pacino vehicle “Manglehorn“ on the way. We’ll have our review for you of the former in a few weeks from Venice: in the meantime, you can watch “Prince Avalanche” in theaters or on VOD now.