Deadline.com has reported that Scott McGehee (The Deep End) and David Siegel (The Deep End, Suture, What Maisie Knew) have partnered with Warner Bros to create a new, modernized iteration of Lord of the Flies, William Golding’s classic contribution to the Western Literary Canon. However, their intention is to adapt the novel with a very particular, key twist: the film, which famously focuses on a group of young boys stranded on an island who descend into madness once the social order they’ve constructed crumbles, will replace its male cast with an all-female one.
In a conversation with Deadline, Siegel said of their modern Lord of the Flies: ““We want to do a very faithful but contemporized adaptation of the book, but our idea was to do it with all girls rather than boys. It is a timeless story that is especially relevant today, with the interpersonal conflicts and bullying, and the idea of children forming a society and replicating the behavior they saw in grownups before they were marooned.”
In addition, McGeehee discussed the subject matter of the novel, describing it as “aggressively suspenseful, and taking the opportunity to tell it in a way it hasn’t been told before, with girls rather than boys, is that it shifts things in a way that might help people see the story anew. It breaks away from some of the conventions, the ways we think of boys and aggression. People still talk about the movie and the book from the standpoint of pure storytelling. It is a great adventure story, real entertainment, but it has a lot of meaning embedded in it as well. We’ve gotten to think about this awhile as the rights were worked out, and we’re super eager to put pen to paper.”
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Each of what the two men had to say about the subject was promising, and their previous work, which has focused heavily on depicting trauma through the eyes of young people, is certainly promising. An all-female Lord of the Flies sounds fascinating.
The only foreseeable issue here is that there are no women currently attached to the project, and this is likely to be a point of (mostly rightful) contention among consumers of the film. A group of men telling the story of a group of young girls getting violent with each other on an island is likely to take on sexist undertones. However, with the right talent attached to the project, this could easily be averted.
Here’s to hoping they manage to get the right people on board.
