Wolfgang Peterson adding ‘Paprika’ to his movie menu?

Wolfgang Peterson (THE PERFECT STORM, TROY) is a filmmaker known for three things… epically entertaining adventure flicks, long intervals between films and a frequent inability to keep his films under two hours. Out of his last nine films, six of them surpassed the two hour mark, including DAS BOOT (1981) which holds the crown with a 149 minutes theatrical cut, a 209 minute director’s cut and a mind-boggling 293 minute uncut version.

Peterson has had a few goes at projects that never panned out, the most recent of which was a long roller coaster of a ride attempting to get Orson Scott Card’s sci-fi epic ENDER’S GAME on the big screen. This ultimately ended with the project being scrapped, making many skeptical sci-fi buffs very happy, as the story is considered by some as being “unfilmable”.

So, with ENDER’S GAME off Peterson’s schedule, what is a man to do? Apparently, he goes out and attempts to remake PAPRIKA, one of the most original and simply perfect feature-length anime masterpieces of all-time.

[The plot] sees a doctor illegally using a new psychotherapy treatment called the “DC Mini”, to manipulate her patients’ dreams from the inside. When one of the few existing prototype machines is stolen, dreams and the real world eventually collide. There are living nightmares, people turning into one another, a weird circus parade, a people-eating robot and a giant doll. — Empire

Wolfgang Peterson is working on his own version of PAPRIKA, which has taken a number of forms including the original 1993 novel, a manga in 2003 and another in 2007. There’s no word yet on whether Peterson’s version will be animated or live-action, but it’s difficult to wrap one’s head around the idea of a live-action version of PAPRIKA. The feature-length anime film PAPRIKA (2006) from Satoshi Kon however is an amazing and strange piece of fantasy storytelling and begs the question… Why remake it at all?

Source: Empire