Hideo Nakata has a fantastic resume, with the original Ringu and Dark Water alongside their US remakes, as well as Chaos and the US rewrite and remake Ring Two. So while I was looking up some information for the previous post for Dark Water I was surprised to see what two titles are on his list of announced movies.
Natsuo Kirino’s Out and a remake of The Entity.
Let’s start with The Entity shall we. The writing is being shared by the original author Frank De Felitta and a relatively new writer David DiGilio, with Executive Production duties fielded by the very competent Takashige Ichise and Bradley Jenkel. Okay, I hear you say, you going somewhere with this? What’s to do with the Executive Producers?
Well, they show that the film has some serious backing, but what really is interesting is when you drill into two of the other Producers. Roy Lee and Doug Davidson. They are producing a number of projects, or should I just say, remakes of very able far eastern movies.
The Departed: Directed by Martin Scorsese, and co-Produced with Jennifer Aniston and Brad Pitt, currently starring Matt Damon and Leonardo DiCaprio!
The Eye: Produced by Tom Cruise under his Cruise\Wagner Production company. Hopefully they can do this movie justice, the original being by the excellent Pang brothers who are nowhere to be seen on this version.
Oldboy: With three writers, and Executive Producing honours being shared by Mary Parent who is also producing The Six Million Dollar Man starring Jim Carey as Steve Austin. Why they need three writers when the movie has already been done perfectly I have no idea!
Chaos: Just as I mentioned the original earlier in the post it seems it’s being remade already. Directed by Jonathan Glazer who is also responsible for Birth and Sexy Beast, again with three writers, but this time at least one of them wrote the original author Hisashi Saito and starring Robert De Niro, there’s a cool move.
There’s one real impressive list of remakes, and they come from some excellent originals. It’s amazing what you can get up to on an IMDB trek! So, what about Out?
Out is a book by Natsuo Kirino, a Japanese author who is quite well known over there for crime novels. This is her first book translated into English, and I’ve read it and think it would make an excellent movie. It’s high tension, normal people in extraordinary circumstances, and some unusual plot turns. You really don’t know how it’s going to turn out (Read my book review).
For the movie they have retained Kirino for the writing credits and the Executive Producer is Mark Ordesky whose credits include the Lord of the Rings trilogy and the forthcoming His Dark Materials: The Golden Compass, which deserves a post all by itself.
I’d recommend keeping an eye out (excuse the pun) for all of these movies, in particular The Eye, Out and Oldboy. As always though, please give the original a chance before you see the Hollywood remake, please, and in the case of Out, I would thoroughly recommend the read.
