We're about to move towards yet another act of David Gordon Green's career. The filmmaker started off with "George Washington," "All The Real Girls" and "Undertow" as a possible heir to Terrence Malick's meditative indie throne, but took a severe left-turn about five years back into abrasive stoner comedy, a shift which had both its successes ("Pineapple Express," "Eastbound & Down") and failures ("Your Highness," "The Sitter"). But for now, it seems, the director is about to try something new, and move into the horror world for his long-gestating remake of Dario Argento's horror classic "Suspiria."
And on the back of recent news that the film was financed, and moving towards a shoot in September, it looks like the director has his lead. Back in the day, the project was intended to star Natalie Portman, but between her Oscar victory for the similarly-themed "Black Swan" and her new motherhood, the actress fell out of the film, but according to Variety, she's being replaced by an actress half her age: namely 15-year-old Isabelle Fuhrman.
The actress broke out with an astonishing performance as the title role in the batshit-crazy future-cult-classic "Orphan," and has since cropped up in last year's indie "Salvation Boulevard," with Greg Kinnear and Pierce Brosnan, and, more notably, as one of the murderous teens in the mega-smash "The Hunger Games," in which she played Clove. The actress recently wrapped a role in M. Night Shyamalan's "After Earth," opposite Will and Jaden Smith, but this certainly marks her biggest role to date.
Assuming the remake, which Green has written with his long-time sound mixer Chris Gebart, doesn't stray too far from the source material, the actress would play Suzy Banyon, an American ballet student who transfers to a school in Italy, only to discover it's run by a group of witches. It's an interesting move for Gordon Green to cast the part so much younger (original star Jessica Harper was 28 when she took on the part), but it makes sense, and Fuhrmann has certainly proven her form in earlier work. Filming will get underway in September, so we should see this towards the tail end of 2013.