For those of you who don’t know of Ryu Murakami’s novel, Audition, you might be more familiar with Takashi Miike’s adaptation. That film, which went on to be a cult hit, is about a widower who starts a fake audition process in order to find another love. When he finally chooses a woman, he gets a one way ticket to crazy town (instead of the more popular Funkytown). Miike’s adaptation has some of the most hair tingling scenes in film, and it looks like someone in the US wants to attempt to do the same.
According to Deadline, Mario Kassar (Rambo, Terminator) wants to produce and English language version of the story with a US setting. And from the looks of the logline, it seems only the names have been changed:
In this version, to be directed by Richard Gray (The Lookalike), Audition‘s unlucky protagonist is Sam Davis, who lives alone with his son following the death of his wife seven years prior and is convinced by a filmmaker friend to stage the fake auditions. The former ballerina with a mysterious past he falls for is now named Evie Lawrence, but otherwise details fall closely in line with Murakami’s best-seller.
If the US version is just a straight remake of Miike’s adaptation without taking liberties of its own, then we’d have a problem. Either way, I’m sure it’s going to be chilling. We’ll have more news as this develops.
[via Deadline]