Though he decided not to stick around for the next Bond film after Skyfall and Spectre, director Sam Mendes still has a an itch to spy on people. The Voyeur's Hotel, however, will be a very different prospect.
Adapted from Gay Talese's New Yorker article and follow-up book, the new film will chart the activity of Colorado resident Gerald Foos, a lifelong voyeur who went so far as to open a hotel so he could covertly spy on his occupants. Telling himself and anyone who wanted him to explain his actions that he was an observer of human behaviour, he'd watch guests having sex and sometimes would do more than observe. He ended up complicit in a murder after flushing a dealer's drugs down the toilet, leading the man to suspect his girlfriend and strangle her. Foos eventually went to Talese, who had written a groundbreaking book on sexual mores, to tell his story.
So not the easiest story to adapt we feel, but one that Mendes can work with. The movie finds him back at DreamWorks, where he kicked off his film career with American Beauty, and Steven Spielberg as a producer. We can just picture Joe Eszterhas, the writer who brought the world voyeuristic thriller Sliver, sitting eagerly by the phone.