Miramax, Focus and Kathleen Kennedy Will TELL NO ONE

Variety reports that Miramax and Focus have acquired rights to remake the French thriller Tell No One, with prolific producer Kathleen Kennedy producing. This is exciting news for me because I’ve read the book and recently caught the movie on DVD. I enjoyed the book by Harlan Coben quite a bit, as I do all his novels, but I thought the movie was even better. How often does that happen?

The story is way too twisty for me to adequately synopsize but here’s the basic premise:  A pediatrician who believes his wife had been abducted and murdered suddenly gets mysterious e-mails from someone eight years later who knows things only his wife would know. The sender wants to set up a meeting but urges him to, you guessed it, tell no one. The doctor gets thrown into a combination of turmoil and hope as he re-investigates the evidence in his wife’s case and probes the possibility that she might be alive. He ignites a chain of events that leads to another death, him being framed for it, his running from police, trying to stay alive long enough to make it to the rendezvous and hopefully see his wife again.

I read the book a long time ago but remember there were some loose ends that weren’t tied up by the end. The movie, which won four Cesar Awards, explained everything clearly and made it all believable. The acting is solid all around, from Francois Cluzet as the grieving doctor and Marie-Josee Croze (The Diving Bell and Butterfly) as the possibly dead wife to Kristin Scott Thomas—speaking perfect French—as the lover of the doctor’s sister.

Since I was disappointed by the recent American adaptation of the BBC’s superb State of Play, there’s trepidation mixed in with my excitement about this remake. It’s ironic since this is an American story and the book is set in the U.S. so it’s actually being brought back to its roots. I do have hope in Kathleen Kennedy producing—she produces most of Steven Spielberg’s films—so I thought I’d start casting the American version just for fun.

For the pediatrician, Jon Hamm or George Clooney would be ideal. The actor has to convey intelligence but can’t look like an action hero because the doctor is just an ordinary guy caught up in extreme circumstances. The wife’s part is much smaller so Cate Blanchett probably wouldn’t do it but Michelle Monaghan or Jennifer Connelly would be great. The pivotal role of the wife’s father, who happens to be a retired police captain, is something Robert De Niro or Anthony Hopkins could knock out of the park. As for the lesbian lover part, why not let Kristin Scott Thomas reprise it?

Anybody else read the book and/or seen the French film? How do you feel about an American adaptation finally being made? How would you cast it?