He nailed the coming-of-age genre with Call Me By Your Name, then he veered into the world of horror with Suspiria, a remake of Dario Argento’s classic giallo. There really was no other logical choice then for Luca Guadagnino than to opt to take on a new adaptation of coming-of-age story turned absolute horror show (and also religious allegory…) Lord Of The Flies.
According to THR The director is in talks with Warner Bros. to take on the project, which he would also produce with his producing partner Marco Morabito. Back in 2017 there was talk of adapting William Golding’s novel but gender swapping it so it would focus on a group of school girls shipwrecked on an island who turn into savages, rather than boys (as in the novel). It would have been written and directed by Scott McGehee and Dan Siegel, though this approach reportedly came under some criticism for having a male creative team behind what was to be a female led story.
Guadagnino’s approach will be more faithful to the text, which sees school boys stuck on the island form factions and become violent and eventually murderous. The book was adapted for a film by Peter Brooke in 1963 and again in 1990 (where the boys were American! The travesty!) directed by Harry Hook and starring a young Balthazar Getty and James Badge Dale.
Meanwhile Guadagnino is working on a mini-series for HBO called We Are Who We Are – it’s a coming-of-age story about American teens growing up on a military base in Italy and stars Jack Dylan Grazer from Shazam! and It.
More as we have it.
