CULLIVER: "WE HAVE SOMETHING TO SAY WITH THIS MATERIAL"
From today's Deadline's Matt Grobar spoke with Danny Ramirez and Tom Culliver about the duo's recently-launched production company, Pinstripes - which was named after their favorite Steven Spielberg film, Catch Me If You Can:
DEADLINE: Will you be acquiring IP to develop projects around, alongside your work on originals?
CULLIVER: Funny you should ask. One of the larger pieces of IP that we’re adapting at the minute is Scarface. Obviously, Danny will play Scarface. We want to modernize it, adapting the original novel. [Editor’s Note: Universal Pictures released the most famous Scarface movie — 1983’s from Brian De Palma— and has flirted with reimagining the property, attaching Luca Guadagnino to direct in 2020. But the source material, a 1930 novel by Armitage Trail, is in the public domain.]
We’re independently developing it; we have some development financing in place. Obviously, there’s the Pacino legacy of it from the ’80s and then the original 1932 movie, but I think it’s ripe for modernizing, and to have someone like Danny in the lead is really exciting.
RAMIREZ: [We’ll be] developing our own IP, but also then going out and finding partners that have interesting IP that want to partner with us as creatives. But there’s also some that we’re just, with our little bit of funds, developing ourselves.
CULLIVER: I think importantly on the IP thing, we’re not going to engage on something if we don’t have a totally unique, fresh way into it. You don’t want to do stuff where you’re just remaking stuff for remakes’ sake. We’re not going to do this cravenly; we have something to say with the material. There’s been too much of that in the last 20 years to just go around making remakes because you can latch onto some audience built into the IP. You’ve got to have a new story to tell within it.
RAMIREZ: Scarface, to us, is the one that it’s been a dream role to play, but also to develop it in a way that I understand it. I think in 2025, it’s more relevant now than ever. So that’s where we’re excited to take this on.