Cary Fukunaga has recently delivered True Detective's masterful first season and completed the Idris Elba-starring **Beasts Of No Nation. But his long-gestating two-film adaptation of Stephen King's It remains in active development. Speaking to Brazilian newspaper O Globo, Fukunaga has revealed that King is an enthusiastic advocate of the latest screenplay, and that the difficult search for the perfect Pennywise continues.
The clown Pennywise is, for those unfamiliar, the form that the unknowable evil entity It takes the better to terrorise the group of childhood friends attempting to face it down. He was memorably played by Tim Curry in the so-so '90s TV version. Some forumites have suggested the leftfield casting of Tilda Swinton for the new iteration, and frankly, we can't now imagine anyone better.
Elsewhere in the Fukunaga interview, perhaps more interesting than non-casting stories is the news that the novel's timeframe has been updated. The dual narrative strands of the book follow our heroes in childhood in the '50s and in adulthood in the '80s: presumably the divide Fukunaga's two films will make. If the director is planning a modern-day take, that means the period-set childhood half will take place no earlier than 1985.
“It’s really good to know Stephen likes what we did," Fukunaga says. "I’ve been on this project for about five years. I had already read versions of the script but nothing felt right. Everybody tried to put too much into it, telling it from the perspective of the adult and the child in a two hour movie. It didn’t fit. So I decided to throw it all away and start from scratch. [Fukunaga and writers David Kajganich and Chase Palmer] changed names, dates, dynamics, but the spirit is similar to what he’d like to see in cinemas, I think."
Pre-production began on It last December, and that script now appears to be locked. But there's still no start date.