THE REINCARNATION of the team that brought you SE7EN!!

Once David Fincher is done directing the facebook movie (still find it so strange that he makes THAT movie at this stage of his career, but I'm oddly looking forward to it), the A-list helmer, one of the biggest in the business right now, is set to return to the dark, macabre, psychological thriller genre that made his name. And he will do it with two guys who went a long way towards making his career back in the day. The Hollywood Reporter say Fincher is to re-team with writer Andrew Kevin Walker and producer Michael De Luca (head of New Line at the time) some 15 years after they shocked cinema with the smart, genre changing and in subsequent years, frequently ripped off thriller Se7en, which stands proud today as one of the most important and well aged films of the 90's. This time it won't be from a highly original Walker script, but instead an adaptation of Max Ehrlich's popular at the time but now long out of print 1973 novel The Reincarnation of Peter Proud. Film is setup at Columbia and it's even got a hint of Hitchcock's Vertigo about it, so my head is now infused with images of Se7en and Vertigo, two of the most stylised movies ever (and two I dearly love) mashed into one mind-bending dish... and I just can't take anymore! This is gonna be awesome!

"Proud" centers on a college professor who begins having recurring dreams and nightmares and, realizing they are images of a past life, decides to search out the source of the visions. With his girlfriend in tow, he discovers a woman and her grown-up daughter who are keys to his past life.

The plan is to contemporize the story which at some point deals with the matter of incest, apparently, but I'm guessing it's not incest the way we know incest. With past lives involved, it will surely be incest but only because we are in the supernatural realm.... i.e. I'm guessing the professor's nightmares are about his past wife and child, and he sleeps with the grown-up child, who at that point he doesn't know is his daughter (albeit past life daughter), so maybe it doesn't count. Or maybe he does know, which makes the accusation of incest stand-up better in court but then reincarnation doesn't exist does it, so the case would be thrown out immediately. I'm getting off track... As I mentioned earlier, the novel was really popular during the time of it's first-run and only two years after it's publication a movie adaptation was already out in theatres, directed by J. Lee Thompson (62's Cape Fear) with Michael Sarrazin in the title role, and also future rising Superman star Margot Kidder. Not that anyone has heard of it these days, let alone seen it... The "electrifying" motion picture has been rarely seen by movie audiences today and hasn't as yet received a DVD transfer. So back to familiar ground for Fincher and it's terrific to see Andrew Kevin Walker writing again. I wasn't really that found of his script for The Wolf Man but man, at one time this dude was the man and it's a crime to cinema that it's taken over ten years to see one of his screenplays back on the screen. His last was Sleepy Hollow! Can magic strike twice then for the duo who probably didn't realise they were changing cinema when they made Se7en. As much as I loved The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (hey, what's with this guy and the epic titles with The Something of Someone Someone?) and Zodiac, and I firmly believe they showcase a much more mature Fincher... BUT my favourite two movies from his body of work are Fight Club and Se7en, and this really does sound like a movie that will take him back onto that track. Let's hope he stays firmly committed to this one and it films next year once he is done with The Social Network. And Brad Pitt to lead a Fincher movie for the fourth time? - This material would surely attract his cultly interesting, "out there" projects he has taken a fancy too recently.