If your film wins the Best Foreign Language Oscar, it’s not suprising there’ll be interest in an American remake. Indeed, what’s perhaps more surprising is that it’s taken this long for Hollywood to start sniffing around this year’s surprised winner, Secrets In Their Eyes.
The LA Times reports that Breach director Billy Ray is now seriously interested in remaking the movie. What’s probably put a lot of people off doing a new version up until now is the movie’s complex structure and dynamics, that involve multiple flashbacks that go from the modern day back to the 1970s, as a retired legal counselor tries to finally solve the murder case that has haunted him for decades. It’s also been difficult to find an American parallel for the military junta, which plays an important background role in the Argentinian original.
However Ray would seem a good choice for a do-over, as he handled the complex Breach well, and spent years writing thrillers such as Shattered Glass and State Of Play (he also wrote Flightplan and Volcano, but the less said about those the better), so he knows what he’s doing in the realm of politics, murder, and corruption.
Warner is currently negotiating the rights to the remake for Ray to write and direct, so it’s still early days.