First remake for Midnight Entertainment
Paris, je t’aime, a love letter to Paris opening May 4th in limited release, re-introduces us to a side of Wes Craven that’s seldom seen (the side that gave us the saccharine-laced Music of the Heart) and places him alongside fellow directors Gus Van Sant, the Coen Bros., Alfonso Cuaron, Vincenzo Natali and Alexander Payne (to name a few) for a series of vignettes set within the city. But never think for a minute that the “Craven” horror fans have all come to bow their shaggy heads and raise a salute to has finally been repressed. After all, don’t forget the man began 2007 with what’s to be the year’s most excruciating, sloppy mutant birth sequence put to screen in The Hills Have Eyes 2, a sequel he co-wrote with his son, Jonathan for Fox Atomic.
“I’m about to go to my little secret house on the island to begin writing something in the thriller genre for Rogue Pictures,” Craven says of the future. Finding his creative kinship with Rogue agreeable, Craven has formed a new division there called Midnight Entertainment to produce genre films for $15 million and under. The first picture to spawn from Midnight will be the long-mooted remake of The Last House on the Left. His aforementioned thriller, meanwhile, isn’t being produced under this deal, but it will still have a home at Rogue.
As for “Last House,” Craven admits that it has taken a year to work out the legal logistics to remake his unsettling 1972 directorial debut. Now that the rights are in the bag, it’s likely we’ll see production begin as early as this fall. “We don’t want to do it quite so brutal because it’s also just a great story,” touts Craven. “[Ingmar] Bergman did the story [‘The Virgin Spring’], and before that it was a medieval story so we’re going to try and split the difference. We’re trying to make a deal with a very interesting director [Dennis Iliadis], a Grecian director who did something called ‘Hardcore’ – about street prostitutes in Greece – that I think is an amazing film. We want somebody who is a real artist who can give it his own vision.”
Those Shocker and The People Under the Stairs remakes that have gotten some press are still in the cards, too, and seeing as Rogue Pictures is a division of Universal there’s a better chance of these updates getting made sooner than later. “I think the one more likely to be done after ‘Last House’ would be ‘People Under the Stairs.’ And I’m not sure why but we’ve found a couple of directors who really want to remake that.” Seeing as the first “People” was produced during the President George Bush Sr. days, is there room in the remake for social commentary on the current state of the country’s presidency? “[In the original] there was more in that era of Bush Sr. of the haves and the have-nots way down at the bottom, cutting social services and stuff. This [present] Bush is so obsessed with the war it’s not quite the same template, but we’ve had a couple of directors give some interesting ideas, so we’ll see.”
Source: Ryan Rotten, JewReview.net
