Stillking Films and Fine & Mellow are planning an English-language remake of the Danish film Terribly Happy, with Henrik Ruben Genz remaining in the director's chair.

Speaking to ScreenDaily.com from his Prague office, Stillking managing director Matthew Stillman said the film would be a scene-by-scene remake of the original, which won the Crystal Globe at Karlovy Vary last summer.

Stillman and Thomas Gammeltoft of Fine & Mellow will produce.

The story is an adaptation of a novel by Erling Jepsen, who also wrote the book which inspired Peter Schonau Fog's film The Art Of Crying. In the darkly comic film, a young Copenhagen police officer with a secret is reassigned to a remote town, where hostile locals resent his attempts to do his job.

' The dialogue and the nuances will be different, of course,' Stillman said. Genz himself is overseeing the English-language adaptation of the script.

The producers want to shoot in the US and are eyeing Louisiana as a possible location. 'We'll shoot it where ever fits. The location should be similar [to the location in the original]: secluded, with bogs, and have a similar sensibility,' Stillman said, adding that Louisiana was especially attractive because of tax incentives in the state

Producers are waiting to complete financing and distribution deals before setting any production dates, but Stillman said that 'in a perfect world' the film would be ready in the second half of 2009.

Stillking has been working with Rogue Pictures to produce The Keep, an adaptation of Jennifer Egan's mystical thriller, but plans have slowed in light Universal's intention to sell Rogue to Relativity Media.

The producers are still looking for a director for Ehren Kruger's (The Ring) script. Stillking has also signed Czech director Ivan Zacharias to direct a film based on events in Moscow in 2002, when Chechen rebels took hostages in a Moscow theatre.

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