AS JULIANNE MOORE GETS CLOSER TO TAKING ON MOTHER OF A ROLE
A month after Chloe Moretz was announced as the lead in MGM's new version of Carrie, Deadline's Mike Fleming reports that the studio has made a formal offer to Julianne Moore to take on the role of Carrie's mother, Margaret White. Meanwhile, according to Peter Hall at Movies.com, MGM's CEO Roger Birnbaum visted his alma mater, the University of Denver, this week, as a guest in the school's film history and production classes. During one of the talks, Birnbaum specifically used the phrase "found footage" while discussing the new version of Carrie, which is being directed by Kimberly Peirce, with a screenplay by Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa that is said to cling closer to Stephen King's novel than Brian De Palma's film version. Hall explains nicely how the found footage format would tie in with the novel:
Now, before you get out your anti-found footage pitch forks, this shouldn't be that surprising. King's original novel is interspersed with various "official" documents recounting what happened on Carrie's deadly prom night (a writing technique called epistolary, which is basically the literary equivalent of found footage), so if Aguirre-Sacasa's script is indeed going back to the source material, the film focusing on "interviews with the survivors of the prom incident" makes perfect sense. It also doesn't necessarily mean Carrie will be filled with first-person POV found footage as we traditionally know - though the person who posted the recap did confirm to us that Birnbaum specifically used the words "found footage" - but is simply using recorded interviews as a framing device much like the book used newspaper clippings, which actually means Peirce's film will have more in common with the 2002 made-for-TV Carrie movie starring Angela Bettis than De Palma's film.