Here Comes Hollywood

With a win for Best Foreign Language Film, Hollywood filmakers have swooped in on Germany's The Lives of Others and plan a remake.
Former Miramax heads, Bob and Harvey Weinstein, have teamed with Anthony Minghella and Sidney Pollack to bring the story to a wider, global audience.
The film was written and directed by Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck in his first-time full-length feature.
http://movies2.nytimes.com/gst/movies/filmography.html?p_id=106775

"Lives of Others set for Hollywood remake Staff and agencies"
Thursday March 1, 2007
Guardian Unlimited
Fresh from its success at this week's Oscars, The Lives of Others is to be overhauled as a Hollywood thriller. The German-language production won the Academy award for best foreign film to add to the European film award it won last December. The American remake is being arranged by former Miramax bosses Bob and Harvey Weinstein in tandem with the Oscar-winning film-makers Anthony Minghella and Sidney Pollack. Since its opening on limited release in the U.S. three weeks ago, The Lives of Others has made a respectable $1.3m. But a big budget, English-language version would guarantee a wider audience. "We would just desperately love for that film to be something that reaches more people," Pollack told Variety magazine. "We haven't gotten locked into making it yet, but we're working hard at trying to get it made." Written and directed by Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, The Lives of Others plays out in 1980s East Germany, at the tail end of the cold war. The plot charts the experiences of a Stasi agent who is ordered by the East German culture minister to wiretap the home of a local poet. Von Donnersmarck's film has been compared to Francis Ford Coppola's paranoid thriller The Conversation and has been seen as an antidote to the cold war "ostalgie" peddled by other recent German films such as Good Bye Lenin.