Indie auteur turned mainstream populist David Gordon Green always has a number of projects on the backburners, and it sounds like a simmering one is ready to start cooking next year.
Buried at the bottom of a Variety article about Tilda Swinton — a potential remake of the 1958 Warner Bros. hit “Auntie Mame” with Italian director Luca Guadagnino — is a little teaser nugget that says Green’s proposed “Suspiria,” remake will be shot sometime in 2010.
It’s not a ton of info, but at least further confirms the project that we have heard very little movement on since August 2008 when it was first announced. Green is currently shooting the medieval stoner comedy, “Your Highness,” in Ireland with Danny McBride and James Franco, and last year there was some doubt whether the rumors of Natalie Portman starring in the remake of Dario Argento’s psychedelic horror remake were true. But then Green went on to hire Portman for ‘Highness,’ so at least some kind of connection was established. Whether she will play the female lead of this new film is not yet confirmed.
Many also assumed Green’s adaptation of the “Deliverance”-like “Freaks Of The Heartland,” for Overture Films might come first, but it sounds like getting weird and strange with “Suspiria,” will be the first order of business. The eclectic filmmaker told MTV News in March 2008 that the “Suspiria” script was already written and said the project was a “opportunity to take all the artistic excellence and be inspired by what was a low budget Italian ’70s gore movie — where the art world meets the violent and supernatural.”
Green’s “Your Highness” will hit theaters October 10th, 2010. A friend of our visited the set recently and told us the budget — as you might imagine — is visibly the highest the director has ever handled and said he had high hopes for the action adventure comedy. After the poor summer Universal had this year, whose aegis the picture is under, they’re hoping exactly the same.