“Why don’t we just remake Cronenberg’s [version] with sexy teenagers?”
That [paraphrased] question was posed to director Todd Lincoln by Fox studios in regard to his now-dormant remake of “The Fly,” which was first a 1958 Kurt Neumann cheapie and later given the body-horror treatment by David Cronenberg, in a version that depicted Jeff Goldblum’s oogy transformation into the human-sized insect of the title. So what exactly was Lincoln going for that would have elicited that kind of response?
“I found actually a really cool way into it,” said Lincoln, sitting down to speak with me about his upcoming feature debut “The Apparition.” “So somebody still becomes a fly, but who becomes a fly, how they become it, what happens, is all completely different. And it’s really…my take was more sort of this part-Val Lewton, part-1970s Don Siegel, part…dark manga that a Kyoto teenager may be reading on a subway…a really outside the box take.”
And as we all know, major Hollywood studios aren’t the biggest fans of “out of the box” thinking – even with a project that’s technically being developed at the studio’s “art house” division (in this case, Fox Searchlight). The problem lies with the fact that the suits working at the top (i.e. at “Big Fox”) still have to sign off on these things, and Lincoln’s idea was clearly too “strange” to spark their interest.
Care to hear the rest of Lincoln’s comments about “The Fly”? Interested in his other developing projects, including adaptations of the comic books “Hack/Slash” and “The Nye Incidents”? Click on the video above.
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