It looks like the guys at Platinum Dunes may be hitting the wall when it comes to their long-announced remake of Hitchcock’s The Birds. If you’ve been following the project, which at one point was going to star Naomi Watts, you probably have realized the heat on its has been cooling – it’s been three or four years since it was first announced. Now producers Brad Fuller and Andrew Form seem to be backing away from the film.
“We keep trying, but I don’t know,” Fuller told a group of us visiting the set of A Nightmare on Elm Street last week. “That’s so hard… to get the script right. We continue, and we struggle, and I just don’t have a ton to say about it until we’ve got something good.”
There are two big limitations for the Platinum Dunes guys. First, it’s the fact that they’re trying to remake Hitchcock. Says Fuller: ‘We lay ourselves out there and get annihilated out there online all day long and that movie just opens us up to a whole different level of annihilation.’
But beyond that there’s the logistical question of how do you make a movie about crazed, homicidal birds… interesting? Audiences expect a lot more today than they did when Hitchcock did his thing.
‘What do they do? They peck and poke,’ said Fuller.
‘And poop,’ Form interjected.
Fuller: ‘Right, so there’s not a lot of variety as to what can happen.’
Form: ‘You start with the shitting and you build up to pecking and then they poke.’
It sounds to me like The Birds could be soon joining Rosemary’s Baby on the pile of projects that didn’t pan out for Platinum Dunes.