Although Baz Luhrmann publicly abandoned his Alexander the Great movie project last year, veteran producer Dino De Laurentiis is pressing ahead with plans to shoot the film with Luhrmann directing a cast led by Leonardo DiCaprio and Nicole Kidman.
"We will shoot the film in one year's time, and it will be the Alexander that everyone has been waiting for," De Laurentiis told Italian newspaper Il Corriere della Sera this week.
The film, which was originally due to shoot in Morocco last April, was put on hold when Oliver Stone's rival Alexander got underway ahead of it.
"I don't want to hit out against Oliver Stone, who merits respect," De Laurentiis added. "But his picture was certainly flawed, and was missing the spine of a screenplay. Epic films are difficult to do well. King Arthur was also flawed. It badly copied ideas from another film in my schedule, which is based on Valerio Massimo Manfredi's novel, The Last Legion."
Meanwhile, De Laurentiis is preparing Decameron, an English-language movie based on Boccaccio's 14th century stories, which were given a sexually candid screen treatment by Pier Paolo Pasolini in 1971. Written and directed by David Leland, the $38m new version focuses on two young lovers (played by Hayden Christensen from Star Wars and Mischa Barton from The OC) fleeing from the black plague of 1348.
De Laurentiis is also planning The Lecter Variation, which follows Dr Hannibal Lecter from his childhood in Lithuania through a period in Paris to his arrival in the US. It will feature Lecter at the ages of 8, 14 and 20, and will be directed by Peter Webber, who made Girl with a Pearl Earring.
Golden touch for Highsmith
Irish director Karl Golden will follow his low-budget début, The Honeymooners, released here last year, with a film based on a Patricia Highsmith story, People Who Knock on the Door. It will be produced by H20 Motion Pictures, headed by Andras Hamori, who describes it as a "dark drama in the vein of American Beauty which takes apart the small-town American family".
H20 is also preparing David Cronenberg's Painkillers, based on Cronenberg's first original screenplay since eXistenZ in 1999. Painkillers is set in the world of radical performance artists and looks at "plastic surgery as performance art", according to Hamori. Cronenberg is now in post-production on A History Of Violence, which stars Viggo Mortensen, Maria Bello, Ed Harris and William Hurt, and opens here in December.
Another view of 'Bridge'
Barry Levinson will direct a new film version of Arthur Miller's A View from the Bridge, which will feature Anthony LaPaglia, Scarlett Johansson and Frances McDormand. LaPaglia, who won a Tony award in the Broadway revival of the play, was the catalyst behind the film, obtaining permission from Miller, who died this month, to license the play for the screen, and getting Andrew Bovell to write the screenplay.
Sidney Lumet first filmed the play in 1961, with Raf Vallone, Jean Sorel and Maureen Stapleton in the leading roles.
More horror from Carpenter
Hot on the heels of Assault On Precinct 13 comes another remake of a John Carpenter thriller, The Fog, which will star Tom Welling (Smallville). Rupert Wainwright is directing the new movie and Carpenter is one of the three producers. His original 1980 version was set in a town where, 100 years earlier, a ship sank under mysterious circumstances in a thick fog, and the ghosts of the deceased mariners returned from their watery graves.
