We have to admit, we thought that after the double-whammy of flops in "Your Highness" and "The Sitter," David Gordon Green might have trouble getting his ambitious redo of Dario Argento's "Suspiria" off the ground. At least at a studio, anyway. But the resilient filmmaker has landed finacing courtesy of Crime Scene Pictures (the relatively new shingle that is also behind the Coens' penned "Gambit" with Colin Firth and Cameron Diaz) and things are now clicking for a September shoot. Nice.
To bring you back up to speed, Green has been talking up this project for a while now, and when we chatted with the director in December he said it was "really close" to happening, and indeed that has panned out. One of the key elements of Argento's original film was the bonkers score by Goblin, and last spring Green actually acquired the rights to it, which suggests that at least in part, he'll be reprising some of it in his version (more on that below). Back when the movie was being lined up to shoot circa 2010, Natalie Portman was in talks for the lead but went off to do another ballet-based movie, "Black Swan" instead. However, Green's take tweaks the setting, with the story now set in a European boarding school.
And while Green has remained tightlipped about what exactly he'll do to "Suspiria," we reckon Argento won't be disappointed. "In a weird way, what got me excited about it [the movie] was not seeing it through my own way, but things that I thought would be cool like if you had composer John Adams take the Goblin theme and make [it] into an opera at the end," he said at SXSW in 2010. "Like try and take all the things that are so artistically ambitious about the movie, the color and style, the beautiful set design… so it was thinking outside my own approach, but also thinking about what I would like to see… it's something that I'm excited about."
And frankly, so are we. While we generally frown at remakes, there are few filmmaker as in love with cinema as Green. While stodgy fans of his early work continue to bemoan that he isn't just making "George Washington" over and over again, it's a testament to his curiosity and enthusiasm that he's made a stoner comedy, a bizarro awesome fantasy-adventure and a one-crazy-night movie in the last few years. So we're pretty stoked to see what he does with this. [Deadline]