Larry Fessenden speaks out on why he left The Orphanage remake

Last Updated on July 23, 2021

If you weren’t aware of it yet, there was buzz earlier in the year surrounding a remake of the hit foriegn flick THE ORPHANAGE. That was about eight months ago and so far the only thing announced was a new director but nothing else. Mark Pellington was actually tapped to direct the English language version of the film, from a script by Larry Fessenden and Guillermo Del Toro. 

However, before Pellington was on board Fessenden was actually supposed to sit in the director’s chair first. Unfortunately things didn’t turn out so well for the chap. Fessenden spoke once before regarding why he split from the project but from a recent interview with The Playlist, there seems to be more regarding the story than there had been originally. 

“I eventually went to LA, we sat down and hashed out the script, then I went off and wrote it. I took his notes, Warner Bros. notes, New Line’s notes. It was a really good script. I was very excited about it. I was going to do it as a New England Gothic, truly shot in New England, and it didn’t pan out. WB wanted to shoot it in South Africa or something nutty. I mean, why do you remake a foreign film in another foreign land? I don’t understand the logic sometimes.”

“But that’s not why we parted ways. Basically, they felt that they couldn’t cast the kind of A-List star they were looking for with my indie reputation. But it was great, Guillermo has always been supportive, he reaches out to me, we might do something else possibly.”

At this point Mark Pellington was hired and the project was then pushed into production…where it all went black soon afterwards. Even today there is still no word on the status of the project. Is it still in production? Is it delayed? Has it been canned all together? Who the hell knows.

The original ORPHANAGE went a bit like this: Laura (Belén Rueda) who purchases her beloved childhood orphanage with dreams of restoring and reopening the long abandoned facility as a place for disabled children. Once there, Laura discovers that the new environment awakens her son’s imagination, but the ongoing fantasy games he plays with an invisible friend quickly turn into something more disturbing. Upon seeing her family increasingly threatened by the strange occurrences in the house, Laura looks to a group of parapsychologists for help in unraveling the mystery that has taken over the place.

Belen Rueda