Don’t Look Now, a tense 1973 psychodrama that is elevated and inextricably defined by director Nicolas Roeg’s singular visual style, is getting a remake from some person, according to The Hollywood Reporter. Producers Andrew Rona and Alex Heineman are currently shopping only the concept of remaking it right now, employing a strategy of taking someone else’s old idea and selling it to a studio, which will then pay someone else to turn it into a new idea—similar to what Rona and Heineman recently did with Escape From New York. The same team is also behind one of the dozen or so Robin Hood rehashes currently floating around, as well as the Liam Neeson “Taken, but on an airplane” thriller Non-Stop. Indeed, they are one of Hollywood’s hottest production duos for things that have already been produced.
Now they’ll bring that same conservationist sensibility to Don’t Look Now, based on a short story by Daphne du Maurier, which found Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie adrift in a crumbling Venice after the death of their daughter, plagued by spectral visions and a lurking sense of dread. The film is rightfully celebrated for Nicolas Roeg’s unique editing techniques, clever motifs, and subtle, impressionist imagery, all turning what could be a rather standard horror story into something haunting and complex. And now Some Person will film it using whatever, for some studio wherever, starring whomever, “from the producers of Non-Stop.”
Of course, Don’t Look Now is also notorious for its graphic sex scene, which for many years people assumed was real—though everyone involved maintains that it wasn’t. So who knows, maybe the pitch is simply “Let’s remake Don’t Look Now, but this time with actual penetration,” which would only be slightly more offensive.