Breck Eisner Wants to Return to the Black Lagoon

Posted by Nathan Deen (nathan@filmschoolrejects.com) on May 5, 2008

Sci Fi Wire is reporting that director Breck Eisner, whom you may know from the sub-par adventure movie Sahara (sub-par because Matthew McConaughey was in it) will remake the 1954 horror classic Creature From the Black Lagoon. The Internet Movie Database already has the project listed under pre-production. Eisner has said that he has already found the perfect Amazon location to shoot the picture.

“I want it to be authentic,” said Eisner; “I want it to be a sea of green rather than CG. It is certainly easy to update the story. It was shot in modern times at the time it was originally made, and this will be shot today in the Amazon. We are updating the tone of the original.”

Eisner wants to do the film justice by shooting it on location. The original was shot on a Universal backlot and he says in some shots, a telephone pole and wire is clearly visible.

“Of Course, in those days nobody thought you’d be able to stop the film and freeze the frame,” said Eisner. “We had a crew in the Amazon in Peru… We found a place called the Forrest of Mirrors, because you can see [from] overhead [that] there are so many lagoons on a thousand-mile green-carpet river, and we found the lagoon we’re going to shoot in.”

The Forrest of Mirrors? Sounds like something out of an un-drafted Indiana Jones script.

Writer Gary Ross, who received and Oscar nomination for his screenplay to the early Tom Hanks film, Big, has an updated version of Creature From the Black Lagoon for Eisner to work with.

Eisner is currently helming a remake of George A. Romero’s The Crazies. He originally wanted to remake Creature first but decided to reverse the projects.

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