Changeling filmmaker David Gordon Green has eight projects listed in development on his IMDB page, but not all of them are real or in motion.
During a SXSW panel in Austin, Texas moderated by The Hollywood Reporter’s Jay Fernandez, Green spoke about several of these projects and the misinformation on the Internet, noting that one project — called “The Precious View” — is actually an old demolition derby project he and Danny McBride wrote more than a decade ago called, “The Precious Few” (which seemed to gain some small traction in 2008).
An extremely prolific writer, Green mentioned the myriad projects that he once wrote during the hour long SXSW Q&A that have still yet to be made: “Nerd Camp”; “Shockproof Sydney Skate,” a novel he adapted for Sydney Pollack; a unmade motorcross project that once had Tom Cruise and Sam Jones (the Wilco documentary, “I Will Break Your Heart”) interested in; “The Secret Life of Bees” which he adapted before it came to the screen in 2007 with Dakota Fanning in a completley different version than what he wrote and several others (many of which we looked at in depth back in 2008).
So what is coming next after his upcoming medieval fantasy stoner comedy, “Your Highness” scheduled to hit this October?
If all goes according to plan it should be the most recently announced project, “The Sitter” starring Jonah Hill which will shoot in the fall. So far, it’s been described as a film that “follows a college student, suspended for the semester and living at home with his single mom, who has a night to remember when he gets talked into baby-sitting the eccentric kids next door: two boys and a wild 8-year-old girl.”
But Green revealed the key plot point of misadventures that will surely be an outrageous comedy of errors. “It’s Jonah Hill as a babysitter taking three kids on a coke run,” he said as the audience chortled with laughter. “It’s a script that Jonah brought to me [penned by Brian Gatewood and Alessandro Tanaka], that he found that I thought, ‘shit yeah.’ It seemed like a good idea at the time.”
Among the projects Green has been attached to recently has been the comic adaptation, “Freaks Of The Heartland,” ankled by Overture’s financial troubles and a remake of Dario Argento’s “Suspiria.” When we told Green IMDB had “Suspiria” listed as being in pre-production, he sarcastically quipped, “Oh, great, I’m glad to hear that. As soon as the check clears all those movies are happening. I’m going to be really busy for the next 48 years.”
That being said, it still sounds like its somewhere in the cards. Green said he’d like to “make it more his way than Dario Argento’s way. And not to be disrespectful of that movie, I think it’s great. But I wouldn’t try to be stylistically derivative of someone else. And at the same time I don’t look at a movie and need all my fingerprints all over it.”
Green said the concept for the project was born when he was at an Italian Film Festival and began talking with a producer who was looking for someone to remake the film. The producer asked Green his thoughts and he offered some of his ideas. Intrigued, the producer was soon hooked and it snowballed from there. “In a weird way, what got me excited about it the movie was not seeing it through my own way, but things that I thought would be cool like if you had composer John Adams take the Goblin theme and make into an opera at the end,” he said. “Like try and take all the things that are so artistically ambitious about the movie, the color and style, the beautiful set design…so it was thinking outside my own approach, but also thinking about what I would like to see. I’m not sure when I’m going to make that but it’s something that I’m excited about.”
Green also noted that he wrote the adaptation with his production sound mixer. “So we wrote it thinking about sound. It was a different approach from how I’ve ever collaborated before. It was just really unique and special in terms of the process. But to make a horror film these days you kinda need to make a $50 million dollar slasher flick based around a [particular] actor or something…”
The Q&A was full of nuggets on several David Gordon Green projects, so hopefully look for more updates in the next few days as we sort through our notes from the festival.
