Del Toro and Day-Lewis up for roles in Scorsese's "Silence" remake?

by Chris MaGee

Now this is how you do a remake... It's been rumoured for a while now that Martin Scorsese was thinking about remaking Masahiro Shinoda's 1971 adaptation of Shusaku Endo's 1966 novel "Silence", but now according to Variety.com the "Taxi Driver" and "Goodfellas" director is bound and determined to make it his next project, and he wants some top notch talent to help him out.

Scorsese and producer Graham King are in talks with Daniel Day-Lewis and Benicio Del Toro to star in the story of two Jesuit priests who in the 17th travel to Japan to investigate the apparent apostasy of their mentor, a Father Cristóvão Ferreira. Of course what they find is that the Tokugawa Shogunate has just defeated a Christian uprising and that the faith has been driven underground.

In the same way that Scorsese made (mostly) all the right choices in his remake of another Asian contemporary classic, Wai-keung Lau's and Siu Fai Mak's "Infernal Affairs", it looks as if he's set on securing the best onscreen talent he can find in order to do the original film justice. It's an especially refreshing approach considering so many remakes of Asian films over the past few years have cast dubiously talented newcomers or TV actors trying to make the transition to film into the main roles.

Of course the casting of Day-Lewis and Del Toro hasn't been locked in yet, but this is a very encouraging sign of what hopefully will be a remake to actually get excited about.

Thanks to Jason Gray for pointing the way to this story.