While it’s been rumoured for a while, producer Stephen Woolley has now officially announced that he’s working on a new adaptation of Charles Dicken’s classic, Great Expectations. It’s due to be the second major literary adapation supported by Optimum Releasing, following Brighton Rock, as the company moves from being purely a distributor to becoming a major player in the UK film industry (it has numerous other films in various stages of production as well it classic book adaptations).
Woolley, whose credits include The Crying Game, Interview With The Vampire and How To Lose Friends & Alienate People, has set David Nicholls (Starter For 10) to write the script, and he’s promised a gothic take on the book, with elements of “suspense and terror”. However there’s no director or cast been announced as yet.
It’s certainly not the first time Great Expectations has come to the big screen. The most notable version is almost certainly the 1946 David Lean apaptation starring John Mills and Alec Guinness, with the most recent being a modern day update starring Ethan Hawke, Gwyneth Paltrow and Robert De Niro in 1998. It’s a truly fantastic story of love, loss and obsession, and there hasn’t been a proper cinema version set in the Victorian era for decades, so this new movie is perhaps a little overdue.