Speak No Evil Director Details Quick Process of Remaking the Original Movie

Speak No Evil comes to theaters tomorrow, just two years after the original debuted in the Netherlands.

By Russ Burlingame

Tomorrow, filmmaker James Watkins heads to theaters with Speak No Evil, a remake of the Danish thriller from filmmaker Christian Tafdrup. It's one of the fastest turnarounds you'll see -- the original movie hit in 2022, and the James McAvoy-starring remake is already in the can -- but Watkins didn't want to do something that was a carbon copy. After all, the original has drawn so much acclaim from audiences foreign and domestic that it got Hollywood's attention about as fast as Snowpiercer or Parasite. Still, the bones of the project were obviously healthy, and Watkins told us that he managed to see the potential in a remake right away.

At that point, then, it was just a case of figuring out how to make it his own, and how to bring something to the table that fans couldn't get by firing up the Tafdrup version with English subtitles on.

"I just kind of come at any story just as, how good do I think the story is? And in terms of adapting something, there's no point in making the same movie," Watkins told ComicBook. "Christian's movie was only a couple of years ago and as you say, it's a brilliant movie. So, I wanted to see, can I make something of my own? Can I bring something different to it? It wasn't a cynical process; I've been sent adaptations before, and I go, 'No, I can't see it,' but this one, I can see. I thought, this speaks to me, and I think it'll speak to other people, and by moving it to the UK and making it culturally specific to a world I know and Americans that I know, it'll change the DNA of the project enough that the two films can have an interesting conversation with each other."

Related:

When an American family is invited to spend the weekend at the idyllic country estate of a charming British family they befriended on vacation, what begins as a dream holiday soon warps into a snarled psychological nightmare. From Blumhouse, the producer of The Black Phone, Get Out, and The Invisible Man, comes an intense suspense thriller for our modern age, starring BAFTA award-winner James McAvoy (Split, Glass) in a riveting performance as the charismatic, alpha-male estate owner whose untrammeled hospitality masks an unspeakable darkness.

Speak No Evil arrives in theaters tomorrow.

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