Alfred Hitchcock’s psychological thriller Vertigo, once named “the greatest film of all time”, is to be remade with Robert Downey Jr in line to star.
According to Deadline, Paramount - the studio that made the original - is planning a remake with Downey Jr “eyeing” the role so memorably played by James Stewart.
British screenwriter Steven Knight, who wrote all six seasons of Peaky Blinders as well as the BBC’s SAS: Rogue Heroes and its recent adaptation of Great Expectations, is set to write the script. In March it was also announced that Knight will be writing the script of an upcoming Star Wars film.
The story, which is based on Boileau-Narcejac’s 1954 novel, D’entre les morts (From Among the Dead), is exquisitely constructed: a San Francisco detective retires after suffering from acute Vertigo, but is then hired by an old friend from university to investigate his mysterious wife, Madeleine Elster (Kim Novak).
She has been acting oddly, going into trances, disappearing for hours on end, and racking up mileage on her car without being able to explain to her husband where she has been and what she has done. Scottie agrees to investigate her actions, but ends up becoming entangled in a story that’s far darker than he first imagined.
Although Hitchcock’s Psycho, which was released two years later, is perhaps his most famous film, Vertigo is arguably his best. Novak is beguiling, the cinematography is gorgeous; there are strange nightmarish sequences and a haunting story of ghoulish possession, which also run through the plot. On its 60th birthday, The Guardian said Vertigo, “still spinning its dizzying magic”.
In 2012, Sight and Sount magazine’s once-a-decade poll of distributors, critics and academics picked Vertigo as the greatest film of all time. In the most recent poll, conducted last year, the Hitchcock masterpiece fell to second place, being overtaken by Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles.
This isn’t the first remake of Hitchcock’s work: In 1965, Vertigo was remade into the Tamil-language thriller Kalangarai Vilakkam; The Lady Vanishes was remade in 1979 in a version starring Angela Lansbury; Psycho was remade in 1998 by Gus Van Sant; and Rear Window was made into a TV film the same year starring Daryl Hannah.
Downey Jr’s last fiction film was 2021’s Dolittle, where he starred as veterinarian Dr John Dolittle, who has the ability to talk to animals. In 2022 he starred in, and produced, a documentary about his father, Robert Downey Sr, who was an acclaimed anti-establishment filmmaker, and who died in 2021.
This year Downey Jr will star in Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer, about the theoretical physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer who is dubbed “the father of the atomic bomb”.
