Final Cut, the French remake of Japanese cult classic zombie comedy One Cut of the Dead, gets a brand new poster today from distributor Kino Lorber.
Directed by Oscar-winner Michel Hazanavicius (The Artist), Final Cut follows a director (Romain Duris, L’Auberge Espagnole) charged with making a live, single-take, low-budget zombie flick in which the cast and crew, one by one, actually turn into zombies. Oscar nominee Bérénice Bejo (The Artist), Matilda Lutz (Revenge), and Finnegan Oldfield (Corsage) also star in the mega meta comedy. Yoshiro Takehara, who appeared as a producer in the original, will also make an appearance in the remake.
Partially inspired by Ryoichi Wada’s stage play, Ghost in the Box, Shin’ichirô Ueda’s original released in 2017 is as hilarious as it is heartwarming. In a statement, Hazanavicius spoke more about what drew him to remake the film:
I’ve wanted to write a comedy about a film shoot for a long time. As long as I’ve been directing, I’ve had the opportunity to observe a lot of funny behaviour and have experienced a lot of shoots, sometimes amazing, sometimes ludicrous, sometimes touching. I like this basic material, a film set, which is a kind of slightly exaggerated micro-society, in which the characters often reveal themselves in a spectacular way. So, I got into it during the first lockdown, started making notes and working on a story that revolved around the idea of a long single take. Then quite by chance, I talked about it to (producer) Vincent Maraval, who was very happy to hear that I was interested in this subject, and told me that his company had just acquired the rights to One Cut of the Dead, a 2017 Japanese student film which is absolutely connected to what I was telling him about. I watched the film and thought it was really good, with a brilliant structural concept.
When asked if Final Cut will remain faithful to its source material, Hazanavicius had this to say:
Yes and no. I have betrayed it as much as possible in order to be as faithful as I could, because I’m convinced that when you adapt you must betray. Of course, I’ve kept the structure and everything I liked, but I also tried to stay true to the energy of the original, shot in six days, with very little money. We worked on a different scale, for sure, but our film wasn’t very expensive either. It was shot in six weeks, with a budget of €4 million.
Final Cut will have its New York Premiere at the Tribeca Festival on June 9 (if you’re one of the lucky attendees you can grab your ticket here) and Kino Lorber will bring Final Cut to theaters in the United States on July 14. Now, here’s that fittingly bold poster:
