Director David Gordon Green has had an interesting career that went from a pair of acclaimed small-scale dramas (UNDERTOW and SNOW ANGELS) to a pair of pot-centric action-adventures (PINEAPPLE EXPRESS and this week’s YOUR HIGHNESS).
Green certainly keeps himself busy (he currently has over a dozen projects in development, according to the occasionally accurate IMDB), with everything from figuring out his next directing effort to producing and writing scripts, like “a movie about rival musical families in Branson, Missouri in the 1960s” and an update of a 1968 Cold War thriller.
“I just finished a script for Warner Bros. that’s a remake of ICE STATION ZEBRA, that’s a big military movie,” Green tells The Playlist. “And I got to go camp out on the arctic circle with the Navy and explore those kind of… you know just the lingo and the politics of what’s going on in the arctic right now so it truly is a passport. Like literally Warner Brothers says, ‘Do you want to get on a jet with the Navy and get on a submarine?’ and you’re like, ‘absofuckinglutely!’“
The original film came from director John Sturges (THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN, THE GREAT ESCAPE) and starred Rock Hudson as a US nuclear submarine commander on a top-priority assignment to rescue civilians from the North Pole research base of the title. He’s kept in the dark as to the particulars, but is accompanied by a squad of Marines, a glib British agent (the great Patrick McGoohan) and a Russian defector (Ernest Borgnine, doing his best bad accent). Espionage, sabotage and a conflict with the Russians on frozen terrain fills the extensive running time.
Not much is known about the remake, but we can assume from Green’s comment that it will be set in the modern day or “near future”.