Over the years, Hollywood has produced its share of “liquor flicks” – films like The Long Weekend (1945) or Days of Wine and Roses (1962) that portray, frame by frame and drip by drip, the agonies of alcoholism.
Last fall, the Danes took a shot at this intoxicating genre by lifting their glasses to Druk, (literally “binge-drinking”), an acclaimed pukefest that won an Oscar for Best International Feature film and a nomination for director Thomas Vinterberg.
This week, Variety and the Hollywood Reporter revealed that Leonard DiCaprio is reputedly lubricating the wheels to star in an English-language remake, tentatively titled Another Round. The speculation was fueled by the fact that DiCaprio’s production company, Appian Way, won the bidding war for the rights. Endeavor Content and Makeready are reportedly raising funding for the film.
According to the trade journals, Vinterberg will be executive producer for Another Round but will not contribute his directorial or writing talents. He had cowritten the Danish script for Druk with Tobias Lindholm.
Druk was a male midlife-crisis dramedy that chronicled the adventures of four dipsomaniacal teachers trying to convince themselves that maintaining a steady blood-alcohol content of 0.05 (just below the DUI threshold in many jurisdictions) would help them release their inner creativity and innate machismo.
When their initial experiments prove satisfying, they double their goal to 0.10 and then go all-out blotto binging. Though one of their number dies in the process, and another loses his wife to infidelity they end their binging but ultimately return to their imbibing in the final, climactic scene.
A Sunday’s Oscar ceremonies, Vinterberg sad that Druk was meant to be a tribute to his 19-year-old daughter who was killed in a car crash shortly after filming began. “We wanted to make a film that celebrates life,” he declared. “We ended up making this movie for her; it’s her monument.”
