Ben Stiller To Star & Direct THE SECRET LIFE OF WALTER MITTY Remake
It's been an on and off again project for the best part of two decades but finally a Hollywood remake of the classic 1947 Danny Kaye starring film looks sure to film in the Autumn!
After years of development of hell, the contemporary remake of the classic 1947 film The Secret Life of Walter Milly(based on James Thurbers 1939 short story), is finally going to happen! Twitch reported this week that Ben Stiller, the latest in a lone line of actors set to reprise the role made famous by Danny Kaye over 60 years ago, and himself attached in the starring role since the spring, has decided he is the best man for the job of directing too. 20th Century Fox are hoping to shoot in the Autumn! This will be the first time Stiller has both directed and starred in a film since Tropic Thunder three years ago but by now he is an experienced hand, his other films where he has pulled double duty are The Cable Guy, Reality Bites and Zoolander. In the original film Walter Mitty was a mild-mannered writer with an overactive imagination, which he used to escape from his miserable life and his authoritarian mother, only for his daydreams to cause him more trouble when he comes back down to Earth. The movie really kicked into gear when a woman closely resembling his own dream vision hands him a black book containing the location of hidden Dutch crown jewels. The confusing conspiracy that forces Mitty to realise that being a hero isnt all he imagined seems perfectly straightforward when contrasted with the current remakes production history. but there you go. We are told in the remake Mitty would no longer be working at a book publishing company but instead as a shop assistant who is given a chance to be a hero and I imagine there'll be plenty more chances to the structure of the story as there's unlimited things to do with a concept as ripe as this. Stiller will work from a script by the talented dramedy scribe Steve Conrad (The Weather Man, The Pursuit Of Happyness) which gives us a huge hope in the project that this simply won't be another broad family and fantastical popcorn comedy like Night at the Museum but hopefully something with a bit more dramatic weight.We chronicled the whole sordid affair of Walter Mitty's development hell last year but the bitsized edition is that directors of the calibre of Steven Spielberg, Gore Verbinski and Ron Howard have been working on the film at one point and despite the likes of Jim Carrey, Will Ferrell, Owen Wilson, Mike Myers and Sacha Baron Cohen being attached to the leading role at any one time, it's taken the best part of two decades to get this remake off the ground. The Secret Life of Walter Mitty looks sure to be Stiller's next film. He has recently come off Brett Ratner's ensemble comedy Tower Heist that opens Nov. 4 and the other two films he was circling - Neighborhood Watch and Noam Baumbach's While We're Young have seemingly slowed down as of late. (Article co-written by Matt Holmes)