It took a little while to uncover this one, but About.com’s Horror Books and Movies site reported recently on a press conference for the upcoming Warner Bros. science fiction/horror film THE VISITING—previously titled INVASION (a moniker since appropriated by the ABC series), and initially developed as an INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS remake. Now only said to be “inspired by” Jack Finney’s original BODY SNATCHERS novel, the movie, which began shooting in late September, stars Nicole Kidman as Carol, a Washington D.C. psychiatrist who discovers that a possessive alien plague is overcoming the Earth and that her son may hold the key to stopping it.
“Of course, no one wants to says it’s a remake,” said Daniel Craig, who plays one of Carol’s colleagues. “It’s a reinvention. That’s very different, you know [wink]. This isn’t a remake, this is reinvented using the original source material.” Reportedly, the script is an allegory about the war on terrorism, and Craig added, “It’s very interesting in my case, having seen the ’70s [film], to see the flavor that it takes on from the time in which it was filmed [and] also being entertaining and very scary. People are going to want to go out and watch, and we have a responsibility to raise some debate about fear.”
The director by Oliver Hirschbiegel, who helmed the psychothriller DAS EXPERIMENT and won an Oscar for his Hitler film DOWNFALL, working from a script by Dave Kajganich. Joel Silver, who is producing THE VISITING (though not as one of his Dark Castle entries), commented, “It’s about fear. It’s not that much of a visual effects picture. It’s very smart, and I think that what Oliver is doing is telling a really kind of insidious tale that has great resonance for today. It’s scary and threatening and an interesting way of telling a science-fiction thriller. The script is wonderful that David wrote, but Oliver’s way of shooting it is very exciting; we will shoot the city of Baltimore a way that’s never been seen before.”
The Epoch Times also attended the press conference, reporting Kidman’s observation that a plot turn that finds her character forcibly separated from her child was especially painful given recent reports of families being torn apart in the Hurricane Katrina disaster. “That’s why this reverberated so strongly, because of seeing those images over and over and over again,” she said, also noting that portraying a psychiatrist will not be nearly as difficult. “I have a father who is a psychologist, so my life has been research,” she noted.
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