It’s been quite a few years since Neil Jordan made some waves with his work on Interview with the Vampire as well as The Crying Game, but he’s returning to some interesting and familiar material as he’s working with producer Stephen Woolley on Byzantium that has both Saoirse Roman and Gemma Arterton taking on the lead roles. The film is not a big budget piece as it’s only being made for $11 million, with shooting beginning this fall, but it has the potential for being something interesting as it will focus more on the characters than the blood sucking action since it has to be judicious with where it spends its money.
According to The Hollywood Reporter, “The original script is penned by Moira Buffini and details the story of a mother vampire who turns her own daughter into a vampire and the pair form a lethal partnership, sometimes posing as sisters.”
The work was originally a youth theater play by Buffini, but this script is adjusting things for a darker and more adult one that would work better on the big screen.
“I love the horror genre and we’ve been working on this for three or four years. I sent it to Neil and he liked the script,” Woolley said. “We’d both recently revisited Angela Carter’s book and it was just chance that when I called [Jordan], we were thinking along the same lines.”
