Yo ho, me heartless hearties

A re-make of Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island.

No, wait, here's the beauty part: Don't make it a splashy or cutesy, super-effects, pop-trendy kids' movie. Model the entire look -- grim and harsh, simple and sun-bleached -- on N. C. Wyeth's tremendous illustrations for the famous 1911 Scribner's edition. If you've never seen the book (reprinted lovingly in 2003) or seen the 17 classic images in it, do yourself a favor and track down a copy in a store just to look at them. They made Wyeth's career as an illustrator and set a tremendously high standard for American book illustrations ever after.

When I was a child, my father read to us from his copy of that first edition, which his father had read to him in turn. And some of those images scared the bejesus out of me. Had trouble going to sleep afterwards.

So for this to work, you'd have to keep the film similarly clean and mean. Hollywood's idea of tough or scary is Chow Yun-Fat with decorative facial scars or elaborately strange digital beasties with hammerhead sharks for -- get this! -- heads. Instead, Wyeth paints a plain, fatherless boy leaving his weeping mother for his first sea voyage, possibly to be gone for years, possibly never to return. Perhaps she knows something he doesn't. A desperate blind man tapping through the darkness "in a frenzy," a cornered teenage lad with two pistols facing down a knife-wielding murderer three times his size, a drunken mad man with a cutlass missing his target but hacking a chunk out of an inn's wooden sign. These were some of the most brutal, hungry-looking men I'd seen outside of the wanted photos in the post office. Raw-burned skin over nothing but muscle and ferocity and a thirst for liquor or money. And their world was unbelievably dark and savage, almost Darwinian -- with the buried treasure a gleaming fantasy of escape.

Wyeth brilliantly conveyed the punishing commonplaces of maritime life: We know literary characters like Capt. Hook and Capt. Ahab and Long John Silver because a lost leg or hand or eye was a standard feature among sailors. Yet Wyeth's chiaroscuro effects from seaside England to tropical beach -- the lighting either stark and etched or smokey and dim -- amplified the overall feel of violence and mystery while still being utterly beautiful. They remain some of the most vivid book-illustration memories of my life. In 1903, Wyeth had described his materials as "true, solid American subjects-nothing foreign about them," yet Scribner's had him illustrate an entire series of adventure yarns by foreigners like Stevenson, Daniel Defoe and Jules Verne. These are some of his finest works, but tragically, they're some of the works he tortured himself over endlessly because he was supposedly cheapening his talent for heroic melodrama and commerce.

So my production design will be important for the film -- hard-worn, stark but striking in its simplicity, its lighting. None of that Hollywood glamor, though. And my soundtrack will be similarly plain and haunting, mostly drum and fife. As for the seadogs: You don't get that cold-eyed, sinewy look on modern American (or British) actors much these days -- especially Hollywood stars -- not unless they've worked hard in the sun for years, lived on the streets, slept on sidewalks. Or drank and smoked so much for so long, their skin and eyes look like an iguana's. With a bad temper.

Which is why I will be keeping control of casting for my Treasure Island re-make. No more Wallace Beery or Robert Newton grinning away as Long John Silver. The crew of my Hispaniola would be actors like Daniel Craig, Rip Torn, Anthony Hopkins, Russell Crowe, Ed Harris, Bill Nighy, Liam Neeson and Keith Richards.

Oh, screw it. I'll just get Judi Dench.

Her Long John Silver would scare the lot of them.