A big-ticket Gothic take on the Little Red Riding Hood story scripted by the writer of ORPHAN has sounded good to us from the start, so we’re keeping an eye on the progress of THE GIRL IN THE RED RIDING HOOD, coming from Warner Bros. and Leonardo DiCaprio’s Appian Way company. This morning, more comments on the project from director Catherine Hardwicke (pictured) have come to light.

Speaking to Screen Daily, Hardwicke went into the development of the script, her plans for the movie and how it compares to her previous TWILIGHT. “Leonardo has this idea of a reinvention of the fairytale,” she tells the trade. “I read the first draft by David Leslie Johnson and loved it. I’ve worked for about five months with him and then a second writer, Rand Ravich, and now we’re back with David. We’re making it a wild thriller in this great Gothic fairytale world, very sexy, romantic and scary. I get to create a whole world. Obviously, I love the TWILIGHT world, it was why I wanted to do it, I had never seen pale, beautiful vampires in the Pacific Northwest, that green lush environment. But still the kids had to wear clothes that would fit into high school. So it was pretty traditional and present-day. This new project lets me go back to how I started: art, architecture and animation.”

Sounds like she’s got some wild plans for the project, and that’s pretty promising; prior to becoming a director, she was a production designer with credits including the weird worlds of Alex Winter’s FREAKED and Rachel Talalay’s TANK GIRL. She further elaborated on her reasons for turning down the reins on the TWILIGHT sequel NEW MOON: “It was in my contract: if TWILIGHT made one and a half times what it cost to make I had first right of refusal to do the next film. But I never wanted to. Even when I was a production designer I never went to an interview if the movie was a sequel. I’d rather do the first in a series. I like something that’s fresh and original, something I haven’t seen before. Sometimes when the second and third ones come out they lose a little bit of that excitement.” Keep your eyes here for more RED RIDING HOOD updates as they come in.

 

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