After impressing early in her career with “Thirteen” and “Lords Of Dogtown,” Catherine Hardwicke hasn’t exactly lived up to her promise in recent times, getting behind the first installment of the ‘Twilight‘ franchise and delivering the tepid “Red Riding Hood” earlier this year.
To be fair, she hasn’t had things all her way, with an interesting musically tinged modern adaptation of “Hamlet” with Emile Hirsch falling apart, and little heard since last year regarding her feature adaptation of the documentary “Freeheld” with Ellen Page set to star. Most recently, Hardwicke has been attached to a Noah Oppenheim-scripted adaptation of “The Maze Runner” and “The Bitch Posse” with Virginia Madsen but, while doing press for the Blu-Ray release of “Red Riding Hood,” the director has revealed that she has another project in the works which has jumped out as a contender for her next picture.
“I have another project that looks like it’s going to go first,” Hardwicke told Collider. “It’s in Sweden and Germany, and it’s really wild. I can’t quite talk about it, but we’ll probably do the announcement in a couple of weeks. It’s a very fun, very crazy story that goes back to more of my ‘Thirteen‘ days. It’s more indie, raw and gritty, and it’s a true story.”
Given her track record of fallen projects, Hardwicke herself is well aware of the fragility of project development, noting that “as a director, you’ve got to have quite a few projects going because you never know which one will actually come together with the financing and get the green light… even after I had just done ‘Twilight,’ which made $400 million at the worldwide box office, I could not get financing for three or four projects that I really loved.”
One project currently undergoing that whole process is the adaptation of Martha O’Connor‘s “Bitch Posse” which centers “on three friends, Cherry, Amy and Rennie, high school seniors who come from troubled homes and form a dangerous alliance called the Bitch Posse. “The writer and myself and Virginia Madsen have been working on that for the last few days,” Hardwicke added. “The writer came out from New York. It’s very interesting. The writer has to sit down now and really roll up her sleeves and do the hard work of putting pen to paper, so I’m not sure how long that will take.”
So which will it be? For now, we’ll wait to hear more about this wild Euro-set project and hope Hardwicke gets back to her more exciting, non-tentpole filmmaking style.
