Live-Action Lilo & Stich Snags Marcel the Shell With Shoes On Director
The long-gestating remake of Lilo & Stitch has reportedly found its director. On Thursday, a report revealed that Dean Fleischer Camp, who recently helmed the critical darling Marcel The Shell With Shoes On, has been attached to direct the new take on Lilo & Stitch. Chris Kekaniokalani Bright is reportedly in talks to wright the script. Producers in the project will include Dan Lin and Jonathan Eirich, with Ryan Halprin executive producing. It is unclear at this point if the film will be released in theaters or on the Disney+ streaming service.
Camp is best known for directing the various Marcel the Shell short films, as well as the recently released theatrical film. He has also helmed various short films, as well as episodes of Brody Stevens: Enjoy It!.
"I mean, I think it's such a gift as a filmmaker to have made a short that you know works and is like, we're making a movie adaptation to this because the shorts were so fun," Camp recently told ComicBook.com of his work on the Marcel the Shell film. "So it's such a great tuning fork to have in your back pocket. Whenever you're like, 'Something feels wrong about this,' you can like go back to those and be like, "Oh, right. Well, that's not really in the film grammar, or Marcel would never say that or whatever."
"It's so incredibly useful to have that. And then I think it was often a case of, Jenny and I, because we had been developing this character for so long, know Marcel so well, and I know the Marcel-ian visual language so well at this point, that it becomes ... Sometimes I can't even really articulate it very well, like right now. But when you see it, you're just like, 'No, that's wrong. Obviously, that's wrong.' So I think it's a combination of that and always asking ourselves, is it documentary? Would this character really do this during a documentary? Would you actually be able to ... A lot of times the difficulty of writing this, that Nick Paley, our co-writer and I would run into, is like, it's a documentary, so how do you tell a story that is scripted and that deserves and needs big emotional moments? How would you do that if you were a documentary and you couldn't just have a character monologue by himself in a perfectly composed shot? So figuring out the language I think was important."
A live-action Lilo & Stitch has been reported about for 2018, leaving many fans curious to see how the unique story might be adapted into a live-action context. Previous rumors had suggested that Jon M. Chu, whose work includes In the Heights and Crazy Rich Asians, was in talks to helm the film.
Are you excited about the Lilo & Stitch live-action film? What do you think of Dean Fleischer Camp joining the project? Share your thoughts with us in the comments below!
h/t: Deadline