Timecrimes is one of those cool foreign films that seemed to get snapped up immediately for an American remake before getting mired in development for years. When the momentum is lost on these sorts of things, the whole “what’s the point?” question begins to loom even larger. Steve Zaillian is certainly not an uninteresting filmmaker to be tackling the interesting little time-travel flick, especially considering his current Dragon Tattoo heat, but when recently discussing his designs on directing the feature and where it’s at development-wise, Zaillian made note that he doesn’t wish to parlay all that into a big budget, preferring to keep it at the same basic scale…

“That’s something I might direct but I don’t know. We have to cast it, but it’s a tricky one, because I want to make it really low budget. I don’t want to do a really big budgeted film for that. I think part of its appeal is that it’s kind of a low budget thriller, but it’s even hard to get that made without a major actor, so the trick is to find the right actor that doesn’t suddenly push the budget up into the 20s or 30s. I’d like to make it for 10 million bucks. You look at it and it’s one of the rare opportunities where you have four characters, two locations, why do you need to spend $40 million dollars? This is a gift, this is a story that you wouldn’t want to tell any differently, and it happens to be an economical way to go.”

So without bringing the kind of high-dollar slickness to the story that an expensive American remake would entail, what does Zaillian see to be improved by translating the film to English? In the case of Dragon Tattoo an extra hundred million dollars meant a far-ranging story could be filmed intricately without sacrificing scale. Here… what new idea or approach is there to offer? I never see anything wrong with a remake in theory, but approaching something from as close of an angle as possible is rarely exciting.

These are just casual mentions in press interviews for another film though, so we’re still a ways out from seeing how this is going to come together.

Twitter
Comment Below
Message Board

Source | Coming Soon] (via /Film)