4 hours Ago By Louis Chilton
Acclaimed Japanese horror film Audition is set to get an English-language remake. Directed by Takashi Miike, the original 1999 film has been embraced as a classic of the genre, and is notorious for its shocking and gory final sequence . According to Deadline , the new project is being written and directed by Christian Tafdrup, the Danish filmmaker behind the original Speak No Evil (remade last year into an English-language film starring James McAvoy).
The new film will adapt the Ryū Murakami novel that inspired the Japanese original. Audition follows a middle-aged widow who stages auditions for a fake film project in order to find a partner – only for the woman he picks to reveal a serious dark side. During a pre-release screening at the Rotterdam film festival, audience members walked out the cinema, reportedly telling Miike, “You’re sick!” (according to The Guardian and Sight & Sound ).
The Mirror , meanwhile, reported that two people passed out in the screening during the film’s run in Dublin, with more than 20 people leaving the cinema before the end. Despite the controversies, the film is nonetheless considered a modern horror classic, and helped launch Miike’s career in the West. Re-appraising the film for The Independent in 2020 , Clarisse Loughrey wrote: “ Audition is perhaps the greatest demonstration of Miike’s crazed brilliance.
He’s famously prolific, with over a hundred features, TV productions, music videos and short films under his belt – in every imaginable genre, from zombie musicals ( The Happiness of the Katakuris ) to superhero films ( Zebraman ). “But the films primarily exported to the west, and responsible for his reputation here, are those of a more exploitative, nihilistic flavour. No wonder Quentin Tarantino declared him ‘the godfather of ultra-violent, get-under-your-skin movies’.
” Miike himself has claimed to be unsurprised by the violent film’s popularity among western audiences. "I have no idea what goes on in the minds of people in the west and I don't pretend to know what their tastes are,” he said, “and I don't want to start thinking about that. “It's nice that they liked my movie, but I'm not going to start deliberately worrying about why or what I can do to make it happen again.
" Last July, the actor Kevin Bacon revealed that he had once attempted to spearhead an English-language remake of the film. “I really tried for a lot of years to do an American version of it,” he told FilmUpdates . “We never really got it together.
It was difficult for a lot of reasons. I was close [to making it], but we didn’t get it all the way. But that is a great movie.
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