She Leaves: The Remake!

I know I’m the first to bemoan European art house filmmakers who sell their films to Hollywood only to have them remade into bland, pointless, mainstream blockbusters, but it appears a similar fate has befallen one of my early student films, She Leaves (made at film school in 1993). Well, sort of. I worked with producer Bruce Webb in 1995 on a low-budget road movie shot in Nottingham and Morocco. Since then he’s run a successful production company, Whatever Pictures, and recently directed his first feature film, The Be All and End All, about a youth with a heart condition not wanting to die a virgin, featuring, among others, Liza Tarbuck.

Anyway, what I’m getting to is that Bruce remembered me telling him about She Leaves in Morocco when it had for its soundtrack the Shipping Forecast (now it’s just Boards of Canada). Something about it caught Bruce’s imagination (presumably the naked woman in a bath). He asked my permission last year to re-make it. Bemused, I of course said yes and promptly forgot all about it. Now he tells me he’s actually shot it, though it’s a long way from being finished as he’s going to spend a lot of time on the sound. The edge he has over my version – apart from skill, experience, budget, proper actors, technology, etc – is he knows the man who reads out the shipping news and is getting him to do the voice over.

Disregard what I said at the start – remakes? They’re the ultimate compliment! I’m looking forward to seeing Bruce’s interpretation. In the meantime, you’ll probably want to revisit my original (above). And be reminded about my DVD. Which Bruce and his girlfriend love, by the way, though possibly ironically.