Road Games, Patrick remake in the cards?
Jamie Blanks is pitting Jesus versus Mother Nature.
The director gave ShockTillYouDrop.com the first casting scoop on his upcoming remake of Colin Eggleston’s thriller Long Weekend (see our previous news item on the project here).
“I’ve cast Jim Caviezel (pictured, The Passion of the Christ) and Claudia Karvan who was just in Daybreakers, the Spierig Bros. movie. She’s perfect casting,” Blanks says after garnering two awards for his lean ‘n mean Storm Warning at Los Angeles’ Screamfest. With his two actors locked (there’s really only two principle roles in the picture), Blanks is prepping to shoot in the southern part of Australia, near Tasmania. “Virgin territory. No one has ever shot there before.”
“No CGI” is one mandate he says he intends to adhere to on this tale of nature run amok. “I’m going to stick very closely to the original film. We’re going to do it all like we did back in the ’70s – give it a bit of a retro feel. I don’t want to re-invent it, I want to remake it, put my style on it. The couple in the film, they’re relationship isn’t going to be so cut-and-dry as in the original film. There will be some complexities to that, but I’m going to go for the ambiguity the original had – maybe nature rose up, maybe it didn’t. That’ll all be in place.”
Scribe Everett De Roche – also responsible for writing Storm Warning – is adapting “Weekend” based on the script he wrote nearly 30 years ago. “We were on Storm Warning together so he was around every day of the shoot. We bounced ideas a lot together and throughout the course of that time we became great friends and I kept telling him, ‘I really want to do Long Weekend, man.’ He told me I was the only one interested. So, that’s how all of this happened.”
That said, with this creative partnership in place – any chance of revisiting other De Roche films? Razorback maybe? “Maybe we will,” he smiles, perking up even more with, “Maybe we’ll do…Road Games. I might also remake Patrick. Not direct that one, but I will produce it.”
Source: Ryan Rotten
