While TIFF is pretty much 10 days of endless movie watching, it’s also 10 days of standing in lines or sitting in coffee shops and lounges, typing away furiously at a keyboard. Unlike Cannes where press and industry types don’t generally mingle, TIFF screens movies for both groups together so you end up hanging out in the same places and of course, conversations tend to pick up.
The long and short of it, a source close to the gestating Catherine Hardwicke film “Haml3t” starring Emile Hirsch gave us a sad update on the project. It appears the picture has fallen apart and moreover, doesn’t appear likely to get made anytime soon. The specific reasons why it didn’t come together remain unclear, but from what we gathered, the project, at least in the incarnation as it was previously built, probably won’t get made.
And that’s a bummer because last year, it was building steam considerably. The film seemed to have all the pieces with Emile Hirsch set to star in a modern-day adaptation of the classic Shakespeare tale.
“It’s a modern-day film, set at a liberal-arts college where words matter — so people are careful and talk in beautiful language, and Hamlet tries to express himself through music,” Hardwicke explained to MTV last year. “So, we’re using some of the cooler Shakespeare language, in a musical way. [My Hamlet] is like an [aspiring] rock star. He’s got six people that go to his performances, go to clubs and listen to him. It’s like an early Kurt Cobain.”
The production had even gotten as far as hiring frequent Sofia Coppola music supervisor Brian Reitzell (“Lost In Translation,” “Marie Antoinette”) and according to Hirsch talking about the film last summer, they were very close to shooting. “We’re hoping to shoot in the fall, I think in Boston,” said the actor. “One of the movies that inspired us was Baz Luhrmann’s ‘Romeo + Juliet.’ … We want to lower the ages of everyone in the cast, make it much younger and see how that affects the story. Most of the ‘Hamlet’ [interpretations] onscreen are with much older casts, so we wanted to make everybody in college, set it at a college, make it really dark and gear it more towards young adults and young people and teenagers.”
Alas, it is not be. Sounds like it could’ve been something special, but not all is lost. Hardwicke is currently hard at work on her medieval retelling of the classic fairy tale, “The Girl With The Red Riding Hood” starring Amanda Seyfried, Shiloh Fernandez, Gary Oldman, Max Irons, Julie Christie and Lukas Haas.
