Similar Topic: Jake Gyllenhaal & Vanessa Kirby Star In Survival Thriller Film Adaptation Titled ‘Suddenly’
Here is a statement from Bidegain about the situation:
“People don’t understand how a film is made. We were not shooting, and we were not in pre-production. The tentative date of the shoot was eight weeks away. This project came together during the pandemic, so we had only discussed via Zoom. We would talk every week, but we had not met to talk about the film.
“So I came up with the idea of setting up that week in Iceland to read the script together, with Jake and Vanessa. I thought it would be good to meet there, since it was where we were thinking of shooting the movie, and it’s a beautiful place.”
Gyllenhaal had become a producer on the film and he wanted to be more involved in the project creatively. Here's Bidegain's statement about that:
“I’d send the updated script every week, and had a nice back-and-forth with [Pulitzer Prize-winning author] David Lindsay-Abaire, who was working with Jake on the development/ We had just done a new version of the script that incorporated the latest changes, and I did a lot of Zooms with Jake and Vanessa, so I thought the three of us were on the same page. So when we met in Iceland, I assumed that we would just put the finishing touches on it.”
“But when we started reading the script in the same room, we realized that we didn’t have at all the same vision of what the film was meant to be. They wanted more and more changes. It’s normal when there are changes to the script before shooting, but this was different. We each had our own idea of what the message of the film was. I tried to smooth things over once, twice — and then I just realized it wasn’t going to work out, so it had to stop.”
The breaking point came after Gyllenhaal had an epiphany during a walk in the wilderness where he saw a horse, and decided “it shouldn’t be a film about love, but a film about love of nature.” While Kirby wanted the film to have a feminist edge with a radical ending. Bidegain says his vision of the film rested somewhere in the middle:
“It’s a film about love, but also love of nature, and it does have a strong female character.”
The film "Suddenly" eventually did happened, but with different cast members (Gilles Lellouche and Melanie Thierry). The French producer, Attal, and the financial and distribution company Studiocanal remained involved in the project. The movie, titled "Soudain seuls," was released on December 6th in France and had moderate performance at the box office, selling around 250,000 tickets. Bidegain, a highly successful French screenwriter, co-wrote acclaimed films such as the book-based film "The Sisters Brothers" (which also featured Gyllenhaal) intended the film to be his first English-language film as a director.
Source: Variety