If you are moments away from commencing your feature-length, directorial debut then lassoing a pair of thesps in The Hoax's Alfred Molina and Hope Davis is a major coup. Molina was already attached in writer/director David Ondaatje's passion project and most likely is the reason why Davis' name came up when casting the 'landlady' of the pic.
Going into production next month under the new Sony label Stage 6 Films, The Lodger is a reimagining of the Marie Belloc Lowndes novel that served as the basis for Alfred Hitchcock's debut pic, 1927's “The Lodger.” Ondaatje-penned script, set in present-day Los Angeles, has two converging plotlines: The first involves a cat-and-mouse game between a troubled detective (Molina) and an unknown killer; the second explores the relationship between an emotionally disturbed landlady (Davis) and her enigmatic “lodger”.