'Lord of the Flies' Is Getting a Female-Centric Remake

08/31/2017 05:36 pm EDT

William Golding's famous novel Lord of the Flies is getting yet another film adaptation - this time with a twist: the cast of young school children stranded on an island will be all girls.

Deadline reports that Scott McGehee and David Siegel will be writing and directing the new version of Lord of the Flies, which will remain faithful to the source novel, excluding the aforementioned gender twist. Siegel and McGehee previously directed the 2001 film, The Deep End as well as the 2012 film What Maisie Knew. This would be their most high-profile project yet.

According to Siegel:

"We want to do a very faithful but contemporized adaptation of the book, but our idea was to do it with all girls rather than boys. It is a timeless story that is especially relevant today, with the interpersonal conflicts and bullying, and the idea of children forming a society and replicating the behavior they saw in grownups before they were marooned."

Lord of the Flies has been adapted into a famous 1963 film by Peter Brook, as well as a 1990 film by Harry Hook. The novel's themes of fragility of society and its various conflicting aspects are timeless, which is why the novel has been a staple of literary education ever since its release in 1954.

As for the gender-swapping? McGehee describes it the change as:

"...aggressively suspenseful, and taking the opportunity to tell it in a way it hasn't been told before, with girls rather than boys, is that it shifts things in a way that might help people see the story anew. It breaks away from some of the conventions, the ways we think of boys and aggression. People still talk about the movie and the book from the standpoint of pure storytelling. It is a great adventure story, real entertainment, but it has a lot of meaning embedded in it as well. We've gotten to think about this awhile as the rights were worked out, and we're super eager to put pen to paper."

We'll keep you updated on how this new Lord of the Flies film develops.

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