Victor Hugo's classic 19th century gothic tale
The Hunchback of Notre Dame has already enjoyed a fair few screen adventures, most memorably in the 1939 film led by Charles Laughton who easily gave the greatest screen performance of the haunted, grotesque but sensitive Quasimodo - but also the rather fun Disney adaptation, which is harshly looked upon as one of the films that killed their hand-drawn animation studio in the late 90's. Now the kooky
Tim Burton is hoping to forge the definitive screen version of the tale with the excellent
Josh Brolin as his hunchback, in a new movie version at Warner Bros. It's an unexpected and unusual development story that has broken today, not least because the 21st century version of Tim Burton would usually hire
Johnny Depp for such an endeavour, but also because Javier Bardem - an actor who relies less on words and line delivery than Brolin and more on facial nuances and expression via movement and those painstakingly emotive eyes, would surely be the obvious choice for this? Brolin doesn't particularly seem an immediate fit for this. I'm not for a second doubting his talent but it just reminds me of Robert De Niro as Frankenstein, sometimes, even the best actors just aren't suited to certain roles.
THR say Burton wants to direct a script by Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows writers
Kieran and
Michele Mulroney but he is awaiting a final draft before committing, and besides he's got Dark Shadows to shoot this Spring, followed by his animated version of Frankenweenie - so a Hunchback movie probably couldn't begin production until 2013 anyway. Reading between the lines, it seems that Josh Brolin himself pitched the project to WB, who got the development talent together via the actor's commitment. Brolin is said to be a huge fan of the Universal monsters but we've seen many a great thesp suffer when trying to bring their love for these characters to the big screen, most recently Benicio Del Toro and The Wolfman, who looked in the film like an actor whose dream was evaporating with every scene. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D6CbAi9Evik 15 years ago, if Burton had announced this project... it would be my most anticipated film on the horizon but we've been burnt so many times by the tired director this century, that I can't go there anymore. At least this one isn't being eyed as Depp vehicle, so that would hint at something different from Burton but then even Brolin is no sign of quality after what he did with the similarly scarred hero Jonah Hex at Warner Bros.