Prince Avalanche, the English-language remake of Icelandic comedy Either Way, directed by David Gordon Green and starring Paul Rudd and Emile Hirsch, premiered at the Sundance Film Festival last week to critical acclaim.

“For those long-awaiting a return to Green’s indie roots, this is the picture,” Rodrigo Rerez of indiewire.com wrote of the film. “And yet, Prince Avalanche is also simultaneously a step forward and a summation of all Green’s films thus far.”

“Unexpectedly moving and surprisingly funny, Green brings both his poetically observational eye and comedic sensibilities to a low-stakes, but involving picture about two estranged road crew workers who have to endure loneliness, isolation and each other in the remote, and recently fire-ravaged forests of Bastrop, Texas,” Perez continued.

Green told Perez what inspired him to do the remake. “I made this Chrysler commercial last year that had Clint Eastwood in it... The process of making it was very minimal, intimate and with a small crew… and I was thinking, ‘Why don’t I make movies like this?’ Just a little band in a van, jump out and shoot a movie.”

“Then I was up in New York talking to one of my buddies and I was telling him about it. I was like, ‘I just need a couple of people, just grab a couple of friends that are actors and go down to this park and make this movie with this lo-fi process.’ He said you should see this movie Either Way my friend just worked on in Iceland and remake that,” Green recalled.

Click here to read more about the Icelandic version of the film, originally released as Á annan veg by director Hafsteinn Gunnar Sigurðsson in 2011, and here to read the full interview with Green.

ESA