Martin Scorsese To Remake James Caan's THE GAMBLER With Leonardo DiCaprio
Legendary director re-teams with his The Departed screenwriter and lead for a new take on the 1974 drama about the highs & lows of gambling!
The legendary Martin Scorsese is getting back into the remake game with writer William Monahan. Deadline reports that the pair, both Oscar winners for their 2006 remake The Departed, are teaming up at Paramount Pictures for a new take on Karel Reiszs 1974 drama The Gambler. Written back then as the first produced screenplay from future Bugsy writer James Toback (currently working on the Gotti/John Travolta movie) the original starred James Caan as a respected English professor living in New York who falls into a gambling addition, forcing him to extort money from this mother and all kinds of other dirty-underhanded things, experiencing the highs & the very lows from his dangerous vice. In the least surprising casting of all time, Scorsese's muse Leonardo DiCaprio would lead and the movie will reunite Scorsese with New York for the first time since Gangs of New York. I've never seen The Gambler but I certainly know of it - a movie made at the height of Caan's post-The Godfather fame and was filmed when Caan was suffering from an addiction himself, to cocaine abuse. 
Of course usually this is the time we moan about another remake but when it's Scorsese we are always a little less angry, aren't we? Plus The Gambler is not the 70's classic that would be sacred from a remake and there's no reason why Scorsese couldn't deliver a better film as he did with his two stellar remakes The Departed and Cape Fear. And for DiCaprio? He trusts Scorsese enough to walk with him into any project right now. But the next question is... when/if this will actually film? 
We've understood for a while that once he has finished with his 3D kids movie Hugo and that is out in cinema's, he will immediately begin production on Silence this winter, his long-gestated drama about two 17th century Jesuit priests who face violence and persecution when they travel to Japan to locate their mentor and to spread the gospel of Christianity. It is an adaptation of Shusaku Endos 60s published novel and would star Daniel Day-Lewis, Benicio Del Toro and Gael Garcia Bernal. As far as we understand those plans haven't changed but trying to predict what movie would come after that is a little more tricky. He's got The Irishman, his Expendables for Gangsters tale that star Robert De Niro, Al Pacino and Harvey Keitel that we sincerely hope he makes, plus he has been eyeing a movie about the Furious Love between the late Hollywood giants Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, and then also he somehow needs to fit in The Five Obstructions with Lars Von Trier. Not only that but there is The Wolf of Wall Street that we had heard Scorsese had dropped it when Warner Bros let the project go but there's reports he might yet still be attached as DiCaprio has huge interest in starring. So there's definitely no guarantees The Gambler will happen and in truth, there's more interesting projects to us above, but we'd definitely take another DiCaprio/Scorsese drama over anything 3D and kids related. We would prefer not to see another Hugo Cabret from Marty... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bw7yoEepL30