(CBR) When it comes to most movies, there can be only one director. For Summit Entertainment”s upcoming remake of “Highlander”, Deadline reports that it”ll be Cedric Nicolas-Troyan, whose previous film experience is in visual effects and as a second-unit director.
The script was penned by “Iron Man” writers Art Marcum and Matt Holloway, based on a franchise that debuted in 1986. Word is that the new version will take plenty of cues from the first, which focused on an immortal warrior named Connor McCleod (Christopher Lambert), who learns about his lineage from Juan Sánchez Villa-Lobos Ramírez (Sean Connery) and fights the Kurgan (Clancy Brown).
“I have been working on my pitch for this since the summer, and when I got there I met the original producer and I just started geeking out and he loved it,” Nicolas-Troyan told Deadline. “The first movie came out when I was a teenager in France and it was one of my favorite films of those years. I loved the series also, they shot a lot of it in France, on the Seine River. My first reaction, like everybody else, was, really, do we need a remake? Then I read the script, and I thought about how Russell Mulcahy was this super visual video director who brought the pulse of the 80s to the film so well. I started thinking about taking those great characters and matching them with a modern, visceral take, and then I was in love with the idea and I just went for it.”
The director will supervise another pass at the script, with an eye toward starting production in 2014.