Brian De Palma’s work rate has certainly slowed down in recent years. Indeed we’ve only had Femme Fatale, The Black Dahlia and Redacted from him in the last decade. However despite reaching his 70s, he’s not ready to completely retire just yet, with Variety reporting that he’s set his sights on a remake of the 2010 French thriller, Crime d’amour, which will be retitled Passion for its English-language incarnation.
French company SBS, which is also backing Roman Polanski’s Gods Of Carnage, is behind the film, but despite this, the movie won’t be set on the continent and will instead move the action to Britain (although most of it will be shot in Germany). In the original, Kristin Scott Thomas and Ludivine Sagnier played feuding corporate execs, one of whom is driven to kill the other.
It seems De Palma sees it as a return to the sexually charged thriller he made several of in the late 70s and early 80s, saying, “Not since Dressed to Kill have I had a chance to combine eroticism, suspense, mystery and murder into one spell-binding cinematic experience.”
Hopefully it’ll also be a return to the quality those early movies showed, as while Redacted was interesting, he has been off his game for quite a while, so it’d be nice if he could make at least one more great movie – and here he has at least got the source material.
Passion shoots in August, with the cast expected to be announced at the Cannes Film Festival in May.