Warner Brothers have decided to take a new spin on William Golding’s classic novel ‘Lord of the Flies’ by rebooting it with a female cast instead of boys. We’ve just learned that Scott McGehee (‘What Maisie Knew,”Bee Season’) & David Siegel (‘The Deep End,”Uncertainty’) have signed on to both write and direct this new take on the film. They’re planning to stay faithful to the novel outside of the sex of those involved in the story.
The novel has already had a well known 1963 cinematic adaptation by Peter Brook as well as Castle Rock having Harry Hook direct a second version in 1990. With few viewers venturing into black and white movie territory to see the first one these days and the later version mostly overlooked it is no surprise that a studio would want to revisit the material and add a new twist as well.
The pair are huge fans of the original film and wanted to make an updated version that might capture the imagination of today’s audiences. While Warner Brothers have had to work out rights issues, it looks like everything is now on track for the film to go forward.
According to Siegel:
“We want to do a very faithful but contemporized adaptation of the book, but our idea was to do it with all girls rather than boys. It is a timeless story that is especially relevant today, with the interpersonal conflicts and bullying, and the idea of children forming a society and replicating the behavior they saw in grownups before they were marooned.”
McGehee expanded on this by talking about the source material and say that it…
“is aggressively suspenseful, and taking the opportunity to tell it in a way it hasn’t been told before, with girls rather than boys, is that it shifts things in a way that might help people see the story anew. It breaks away from some of the conventions, the ways we think of boys and aggression. People still talk about the movie and the book from the standpoint of pure storytelling,” he said. “It is a great adventure story, real entertainment, but it has a lot of meaning embedded in it as well. We’ve gotten to think about this awhile as the rights were worked out, and we’re super eager to put pen to paper.”
While less plausible to see this happening today, the idea behind ‘Lord of the Flies’ is both terrifying and game-changing in how easily you could see our construct of society fall apart.
Are you interested in a new take on ‘Lord of the Flies’? Does the gender swap sound like it could lend something new to the story being told? Share your thoughts below!
Source: Deadline
