Five years after a seemingly unending development process, Universal’s long-brewing Scarface remaining finally has a director in Luca Guadagnino (Call Me By Your Name, Suspira).
The new film marks the latest incarnation of the core immigrant story of Scarface which Variety‘s Justin Kroll elucidates will be a “reimagining”; Howard Hawks and Richard Rosson directed the 1932 pic long prior to Brian DePalma etching violent crime cinema history with his own 1983 opus starring Al Pacino.
Attempts at a sequel and a remake have been well underway since 2001 with little progress on nabbing a director, and with Jonathan Herman penning a draft along with other writers in the project’s extenuating developmental history. The reigns were since handed to Joel and Ethan Coen (The Ballad Of Buster Scruggs, The Jesus Rolls) whose script will serve as the basis for the pic.
Guadagnino is one of a handful of directors whose names circled the film in the last five years, with The Equalizer helmer Antoine Fuqua getting mentions in 2016, and directors like David Ayer, David McKenzie and Peter Berg thereafter.
Scarface hails from Dylan Clark Productions, with Clark producing and with SVP Brian Williams exec producing next to Scott Stuber and Marco Marabito. Universal Pictures’s Senior VP of production Jay Polidoro and director of development Lexi Barta will oversee for the studio.