A classic remake without a Hitch
REBECCA I Ben Wheatley goes to Manderley for a new version of Daphne du Maurier’s gothic classic.
I’ve been working on a few things with Working Title for about five years now,” says writer/director Ben Wheatley, sipping a hot cup of tea on the bank of the Thames on a cold winter night. “They said, ‘This is a script of Rebecca we’ve been working on. It’s a Jane Goldman version. Do you want to read it?’ I said, ‘Of course,’ and it was great. It appealed to me because it’s a chance to do something complicated in terms of the emotional travel of the characters, and the light and dark and the romance. And the horror of it is really exciting.”
Very much an adaptation of Daphne du Maurier’s 1938 gothic-romance novel rather than a remake of Hitchcock’s 1940 film, Wheatley’s version will start shooting in May and is sticking to du Maurier’s Cornwall locations and period setting. Armie Hammer, who previously worked with Wheatley on Free Fire, will play mysterious widower Maximilian de Winter (Laurence Olivier in the Hitchcock version), while Lily James has signed on as de Winter’s naïve second wife (Joan Fontaine for Hitch).
By the time you read this, sinister housekeeper Mrs. Danvers, who adores de Winter’s previous wife,
the late Rebecca, and is forever undermining and persecuting the new lady of the house, will likely have been announced. Wheatley knows who it is and promises it’s an exciting name (“It’s such a great part”) but is keeping shtum as Teasers goes to press. Thankfully, he’s happy to clear up some other matters…
“It’s a period piece, and obviously there are elements that are plot-based that you have to be delicate about, and other things that would just make a modern audience scream
[with frustration],” he offers when asked if the rather insipid heroine will be granted a little more oomph to fit today’s political climate. “But the book is partly about those moments, so you don’t want to throw the baby out with the bathwater and turn it into a character who’s in control. There would be no point making the film. It would be something else, and disrespectful of the book.”
And Hammer, we trust, will not be playing de Winter, one of the great (anti)heroes of English literature, as an American? Wheatley shakes his head. “There’s something about Hammer,” he explains of his choice. “He’s a matinee idol but what I see in him is an emotional complexity. And also, when you think about his whole family, the background he comes from [his father owns several businesses, his paternal great-grandfather was an oil tycoon], he’s not a million miles away from the de Winters.”
So he’ll be doing an English accent, then? Wheatley chortles. “He’s an actor. He will be acting.”