Peter Jackson to remake The Dam Busters

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By Lester Haines • Get more from this author

Posted in Entertainment, 31st August 2006 14:23 GMT

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Peter Jackson has announced he will remake 1954 classic The Dam Busters, the BBC reports.

Jackson admitted he "really loved" the film as a child and enthused to Screen Daily: "There's that wonderful mentality of the British during the war - that heads-down, persevering, keep-on-plugging-away mentality which is the spirit of Dam Busters."

The original film cast Richard Todd as Wing Commander Guy Gibson and Michael Redgrave as Barnes Wallis. Jackson promised his version would be "as authentic as possible and as close to the spirit of the original as possible".

He'll be assisted in fulfilling the former by having access to details of the mission which were still classified in 1954. He noted: "So much of it was still secret. They [the filmmakers] weren't even allowed to show the bomb itself and had to create a fictionalised bomb."

When Jackson first enquired about the film rights back in the 1990s, he was told that Mel Gibson had a plan to direct and possibly act in his own remake. Mercifully for cinemagoers, that never happened. The result would most certainly have been a U-571-style adaptation showing the Americans breaching the Möhne and Eder dams, in the process drowning an English army led by a sneering Alan Rickman on its way to massacre Scottish Highlanders.

The Jackson Dam Busters goes into production next year with a budget of £16m to £21m. ®

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