Julia Roberts, Nicole Kidman, Chiwetel Ejiofor and The Secret in Their Eyes

The Hills Have Eyes. The Secret in their Eyes. I always get the two titles mixed up. Except the first is a cheesy horror film while the second is Juan Jose Campanella's Academy Award winning adaptation of El Secreto de Sus Ojos (The Secret in Their Eyes) the 2009 Academy Award winner in the Foreign Language category. It's the latter,  The Secret in Their Eyes, that's getting a new treatment, set to debut on October 23rd; perfect timing for a scary movie about — oops there I go again, mixing up the two.

That won't be a problem with the new version. Writer/director Billy Ray—he scripted both Captain Phillips and Hunger Games—is calling his adaptation Shattered Glass and *  While it's based on the same novel by Eduardo Sacheri about a retired detective still obsessed with both an old case, and a young intern who worked on the case, Ray is changing it up a bit. Here's what he told Entertainment Weekly.

“I felt that as great as that movie is, and I literally mean great, I felt that it needed to be made into a slightly more muscular version of itself, and that just meant it needed a little bit more story and a couple of things I thought were sort of uniquely American touches to justify retelling the story,” he told ET. “I’m pretty confident we found all that.”

One change Ray made was switching up the sexes. In his The Secret in Their Eyes instead of an older male detective, we have Nicole Kidman as the older, more established DA supervisor, Chiewetel Ejiofor is the more junior person in the relationship. Both Ejiofor and Julia Roberts are FBI agents.

Here's the official synopsis:

A tight-knit team of rising FBI investigators – Ray (Chiwetel Ejiofor) and Jess (Julia Roberts), along with their District Attorney supervisor Claire (Nicole Kidman) – is suddenly torn apart when they discover that Jess’s teenage daughter has been brutally and inexplicably murdered. 

Now, thirteen years later, after obsessively searching every day for the elusive killer, Ray finally uncovers a new lead that he’s certain can permanently resolve the case, nail the vicious murderer, and bring long-desired closure to his team. No one is prepared, however, for the shocking, unspeakable secret that will reveal the enduring, destructive effects of personal vengeance on the human soul. 

Interweaving past and present, this deeply layered mystery explores the murky boundaries between justice and revenge, and asks the question: how far would you go to right an unfathomable wrong?

In addition to the sizzle factor that the pairing of Kidman and Ejiofor brings to the production, Ray told ET that the movie will allow audiences see Roberts differently as she taps into her  “capacity to play pain and range.”  After an almost 30 year career in the industry, I wonder how Roberts feels about that. Did he not see August: Osage County? Did he not see The Normal Heart?

“Julia has never played a character like this, and it’s an opportunity for the world at large to see her do something she’s never done before, and it’s pretty breathtaking.” 

 If you think it's risky making another movie after the first one did so well, so recently, so does he.

“If you’re not terrified when you’re making a movie like this, you’re just not awake. You’re making a movie that’s already won an Academy Award, so the bar is set pretty high.” 

“When I sat down to write the movie, I thought I was writing a movie about loss. It turned out that the movie wanted to be about something else. The movie wanted to be about obsession. It wanted to be about these people that are frozen for 13 years because this horrible crime has torn all their lives apart and none of them can get unstuck, and then here comes Ray, played by Chiwetel, who decides he knows a way to unstick them. And then he proceeds to try to do that and with varying degrees of willingness they let him.”

The film, which is already in post production, was shot by Danny Moder, Julia Robert's husband. Moder was also the cinematographer on The Normal Heart. The production design is by Nelson Coates. It's in the hands of the director and his editor now; frankly not sure who the film's editor is.

Shall we take a look at the trailer for the original?

* I totally blew it here, guys, I mixed up an old Billy Ray scripted film with this one. The remake of The Secret in Their Eyes is still being called The Secret in Their Eyes.