This week sees the release of “The Lure,” whose description — it’s a cannibal mermaid musical — tells you everything about its ambitions and the fearlessness of director Agnieszka Smoczynska. So it sounds about right that the filmmaker already has designs on another musical, but one with one of the greatest artists of all time powering it.
Speaking with Birth Movies Death, Smoczynska teased some details about the next music-based project she’s developing. “We want to make a science-fiction opera with music by David Bowie, titled ‘Deranged,’” she said. “It’s about an investigator who is hired by the Art Crime Department to determine whether the murder of a 16-year-old girl is a crime or a work of art. We’ve started to work on it, and I hope it will happen.”
READ MORE: ‘The Lure’ Is A Delirious, Kaleidoscopic Cannibal Mermaid Musical [Review]
For those who know their Bowie back catalog, they’ll know from those details that Smoczynska is referencing the musician’s 1995 album Outside, which was supposed to be the first of a series of records detailing a dystopian vision of 1999. The subsequent records never came, but Bowie included the short story “The diary of Nathan Adler or the art-ritual murder of Baby Grace Blue: A non-linear Gothic Drama Hyper-cycle” in the liner notes, which presumably is helping to form the foundation of the movie.
As it usually goes with these kinds of projects, there are probably all kinds of legal hurdles and music rights to jump through, so who knows if it’ll ever happen? But it sounds like it could be something really unique. For now, Smoczynska is focusing on her next movie, about a woman who loses her memory, but let’s hope that Bowie project manages to get made — it sounds like something he’d approve.
