Films In Production
Amarillo Slim
Milos Forman (One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest, Amadeus) and Nicolas Cage are set to collaborate on a feature film about the larger-than-life gambler Amarillo Slim Preston. Screenwriters Stephen Rivele and Christopher Wilkinson (Ali, Nixon) will adapt Preston 's memoir Amarillo Slim in a World Full of Fat People: The Memoirs of the Greatest Gambler Who Ever Lived. The project will be the first time Forman has stepped into the director's chair since helming the 1999 Jim Carrey vehicle Man on the Moon. Cage is set to produce the Amarillo Slim project as well as star.
Killshot
British stage and screen director John Madden is reteaming with Miramax (their last successful partnership being 1998's Shakespeare in Love) to direct the Elmore Leonard adaptation, Killshot. Based upon a script by Hossein Amini, the thriller follows an innocent couple pursued by two violent killers, a hit man and a sociopath - after they stumble across an extortion scheme. Killshot has been in development for some time and at one point, Tony Scott was tipped to direct with Robert De Niro and Quentin Tarantino as possibilities to star. With Madden now at the helm, there is no word yet as to who will headline.
The Departed
Mark Wahlberg is negotiating to join the cast of Martin Scorsese's latest project The Departed. Leonardo DiCaprio and Matt Damon are already locked to star in the Warner Bros. thriller, which is a remake of Andrew Lau's Hong Kong set Infernal Affairs. The story, set in Boston, centers on a gangster (Damon) who infiltrates the police department and a cop (DiCaprio) who infiltrates the Irish- American gangs at the same time. The two find out that a mole is in each organization and the race is on to find out each other's identity. Wahlberg would play a cop who is a key figure in DiCaprio's life. William Monahan (who scripted Ridley Scott's new epic Kingdom of Heaven) has adapted the material. The Soprano's Exec. Producer Brad Grey and Jennifer Aniston and Brad Pitt's production company 'Plan B', will produce.
The Lovely Bones
2004 Oscar plunderer Peter Jackson and his wife Fran Walsh plan to bring Alice Sebold's dark bestseller The Lovely Bones to the big screen in 2007 after finishing work on their current epic: a remake of King Kong. Jackson and Walsh will begin adapting the screenplay with Lord Of The Rings co-scribe Philippa Boyens next January. The project will then be shopped around to the major studios once the script has been finished and a budget has been finalised. The Lovely Bones, - which was published in 2002, is narrated from heaven by a 14-year-old girl who has been raped and murdered, and focuses on the people left behind to deal with the tragedy. "It's the best kind of fantasy in that it has a lot to say about the real world. You have an experience when you read the book that is unlike any other. I don't want the tone or the mood to be different or lost in the film." says Jackson - who will assume both producing and directing duties on the film.
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
In an attempt to discover exactly what helmer David Fincher (Seven, Fight Club, Panic Room) is currently working on, the current Australian edition of 'Empire Magazine' managed to get hold of him, pin him down and squeeze this brief summary out of him: "What I am desperately trying to do is put this movie together that has been around for about 75 years at Paramount called . It's based on an F.Scott Fitzgerald short story that's been adapted by Eric Roth (Forrest Gump, Ali, The Insider). It's a little 200-page script; a sprawling romance between a woman of 30 and a man who, at 50, begins ageing backwards". "It's dark, it's romantic, and it also deals with mortality in a pretty unflattering way. The guy is born in 1919 - with the film itself beginning in the Civil war, travelling around the world and carrying on all the way through to the year 2000. And we'd have to have the lead actor be recognisable from the ages of 18 to 85 years old" says Fincher.
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