Riding high on building buzz for his upcoming thriller “The Invisible Man,” actor/writer/filmmaker Leigh Whannell has other irons in the fire of late.
A little over a year ago came word that he had been hired to pen the remake of John Carpenter’s iconic classic “Escape From New York” at 20th Century Studios. Set in a future where Manhattan had been turned into an island-sized maximum-security prison, Kurt Russell starred in the original as the outlaw Snake Plissken who is forced to go inside and rescue the U.S. President who crash-landed there.
Speaking with JoBlo this week, the “Upgrade” helmer was asked about the possibility of casting Russell’s son Wyatt Russell. The younger Russell has been making a name for himself in recent years with AMC’s “Lodge 49” series and the Nazi zombie thriller “Overlord,” and he’ll soon have a high-profile role as US Agent/John Walker in the Disney & Marvel series “The Falcon and the Winter Soldier”.
Whannell says Wyatt’s casting could well happen as it “seems like the obvious thing to win the fans over”. He then goes on to explain the difficulty in adapting such a classic:
“It’s funny, I’ve been so busy working on this film [The Invisible Man] where I haven’t had time to circle back around on that project. Sometimes these press releases go out before you’re ready, you’re like, ‘Don’t tell the world!’ I don’t actually know, I really don’t.
That is an iconic character and I think that Snake Plissken is a part of people’s childhood and their adolescence. It’s near and dear to them. So I would tread very carefully with that. I feel like a property like that doesn’t have the same freedom as maybe something like ‘The Invisible Man’ does. He has more elasticity as a character because so many people have had their fingerprints on that. There’s been TV shows and comic books, whereas with Escape from New York, we’re talking about one definitive movie here and you don’t want to mess with it. We’ll see what happens.”
Whannell says the plan is to avoid the ‘bloated tentpole remake path’ which plagued movies like the “Robocop” and “Total Recall” reboots. Whannell doesn’t have a deal to direct at present.
