Spielberg To Remake Japanese Drama LIKE FATHER, LIKE SON

It seems that foreign genre films are the prime candidates for Hollywood to take a do English-language versions. But there have been occasional adaptations for foreign comedies and drams, usually with about the same artistic success rate as their genre counterparts. For every The Departed,a remake of the equally compelling Hong Kong crime drama Infernal Affairs, there are a number of films like 2004’s Shall We Dance, remake of a far superior 1996 Japanese film of the same name. While it is too early to tell, I think that the fact that Steven Spielberg is looking to remake the Japanese drama Like Father, Like Son will put the project into the former and not the latter category.

Spielberg will not be directing the project, but will produce through his Dreamworks production shingle. He explained in a press statement –

When I saw the film at Cannes, I was so impressed by its power to bring such a human story to the screen. Here at DreamWorks Studios, Stacey and our team recognized that it was a story we wanted to remake to bring to our audiences throughout the world.

Director Hirokazu Kore-eda’s film, which won the Cannes Film Festival Jury Prize and was the Palme d’Or runner-up, charts the story of a couple who discover that their six-year-old son is not their biological child, but the son of another couple and that the two children were accidentally swapped at birth at the hospital.

While this is not dramatic territory that has been traveled before, there must be something in this story that has caught the director’s eye. Perhaps the fact that he is a father to both biological and adopted children allowed the material to speak to him on a certain level. But keep in mind that Spielberg’s films almost always can be reduced down to stories about family relationships, and this certainly fits in with that theme nicely.

Via Hollywood Reporter.