DIRECTOR TALKS DARK WATER
Brazilian director Walter Salles spoke with Variety about DARK WATER, the English-language remake of Hideo Nakatas supernatural chiller that Disney will release next summer (shifted from its previously announced January 7 date). This is Salles big-studio debut after helming art-house favorites like CENTRAL STATION and Focus Features current THE MOTORCYCLE DIARIES, and also his first horror project. ‘Genre films are only interesting to me when they manage to transcend the genre,’ Salles tells the trade, citing movies such as Roman Polanskis REPULSION and Jacques Tourneurs original CAT PEOPLE as inspirations. ‘Those films were fascinating to me because they dwelled on the questions of fear and abandonment, not because they were horror films.’
Salles further notes that the caliber of talent also attached to DARK WATER helped draw him to the project, including the cast headed by Jennifer Connelly, John C. Reilly, Tim Roth and Pete Postlethwaite. ‘The actors, mostly coming from the independent arena, were excellent,’ he says, ‘the screenplay written by Rafael Yglesias was intelligent and the producer [Bill Mechanic] is a gentleman.’ The director adds that the ensemble aided him in a more structured shoot than he is used to. ‘Much like in the documentary arena, I dont like to direct to prove a pre-established thesis. I like to find something truthful and fresh as we progress. The beauty of cinema lies in this search for me, and that requires a certain freedom of movement. How do you find that within a more structured reality? Through the actors, and I am truly indebted to Jennifer, Tim and John C. to have saved me so many times in this shoot.’
DARK WATER stars Connelly as a young divorcstruggling to retain custody of her daughter, who moves with her child into a rundown apartment. There, she becomes afflicted by a haunting that manifests itself via watery phenomena. A.D. Vision, which originally planned to give Nakatas original some U.S. art-house play this fall, now will likely send it straight to video in the States, with a tentative street date of January 4.
Courtesy of Fangoria
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