Yesterday Variety confirmed what I first mentioned five months ago as a near-lock, namely that porn star Sasha Grey has been cast in Steven Soderbergh’s new film, The Girlfriend Experience. The reigning AVN “Female Performer of the Year,” the 20-year-old Grey cites Jean-Luc Godard, Bernardo Bertolucci and Catherine Breillat (!) among her favorite filmmakers, and says of working with Soderbergh: “I’ve been an admirer of his films for years, and I’m elated that I have been given a leading role in a character-driven film.” For more on the film, click here.
Category Archives: Casting About
Quentin Tarantino Encourages Misspelling
Well, “Inglorious Bastards” is no more, but that shouldn’t bring a smug exhalation from Michael Madsen just yet. In a press release today touting the start of principal photography on the film in Germany last week, it was confirmed that Quentin Tarantino is going the same English-mangling route as The Pursuit of Happyness, and that the film will be released as Inglourious Basterds.
The ensemble cast includes Brad Pitt, Diane Kruger, Mélanie Laurent, Christoph Waltz, Daniel Brühl, Eli Roth, Samm Levine, B.J. Novak, Til Schweiger, Gedeon Burkhard, Paul Rust, Michael Bacall, Omar Doom, Sylvester Groth, Julie Dreyfus, Jacky Ido, August Diehl, Martin Wuttke, Richard Sammel, Christian Berkel, Sönke Möhring, Michael Fassbender, Mike Myers, Rod Taylor, Denis Menochet and, yes, Cloris Leachman.
The film — which will shoot at Studio Babelsberg as well as in Berlin, Saxony and Paris — begins in German-occupied France, where Shosanna Dreyfus (Laurent) witnesses the execution of her family at the hand of Nazi Colonel Hans Landa (Waltz). Shosanna narrowly escapes and flees to Paris, where she forges a new identity as the owner and operator of a cinema. Elsewhere in Europe, Lieutenant Aldo Raine (Pitt) organizes a group of Jewish-American soldiers to engage in targeted acts of retribution. Known to their enemy as “The Basterds,” Raine’s squad joins German actress and undercover agent Bridget Von Hammersmark (Kruger) on a mission to take down the leaders of The Third Reich. Fates converge under a cinema marquee, where Shosanna is poised to carry out a revenge plan of her own.
Inglourious Basterds reunites Tarantino with Academy Award-nominated
editor Sally Menke, Oscar-winning director of photography Bob
Richardson and production designer David Wasco; joining Tarantino for
the first time is costume designer Anna
Sheppard. The film will be released worldwide in 2009, with The Weinstein Company handling domestic duty and Universal releasing the film internationally.
Johnny Depp Nets Record Payday to Reprise Jack Sparrow
“Johnny Depp is rich, bee-otch!” Well, $56 million is an absurd amount, to be sure. But given the true art this guy has birthed, and the humble way he wears his fame, it’s hard to really hold a grudge.
Ben Affleck Goes to Town
Per Variety, Ben Affleck is doing the smart thing for his next foray behind the camera. After having wrapped up a role opposite Russell Crowe in the political thriller State of Play, he’s going back to the gritty blue-collar Boston suburbs for The Town, an adaptation of a Chuck Hogan novel, The Prince of Thieves, which Affleck will rewrite, direct and star in for Warner Bros., playing a career thief who becomes smitten by the manager of a bank. The tonal and geographic authenticity of Affleck’s directorial debut, Gone Baby Gone, was one of its strongest selling points, so while at first half-glance this is likely more The Thomas Crown Affair than Out of Sight, that’s not necessarily a bad thing. It’s right in Affleck’s wheelhouse, and thus still a good move, all other variables unseen.
Judd Apatow Demands, Gets DP Janusz Kaminski
So Judd Apatow‘s super-secret new film Funny People — with Adam Sandler, Seth Rogen, Jonah Hill, Jason Schwartzman, Eric Bana and Apatow’s wife Leslie Mann — is being shot by… Oscar-winning cinematographer Janusz Kaminski? Yes, it appears so, and at the express insistence of Apatow, I’m told. (Which makes sense, really, as his name assuredly wouldn’t have come up via other channels.) Solidly sourced word also places the film’s budget around $90 million, leading one to wonder if Universal learned their lesson with Evan Almighty, namely that mega-budgeted comedies are often a recipe for disaster. Oh, right, it’s a co-production with Sony. Spread the damage, then, I guess it makes Hollywood sense.
David Duchovny, Téa Leoni Born to Rock
Super-hot power couple Téa Leoni and David Duchovny are ready to rock. CBS has acquired the comedy spec Born to Rock from writers Jess
Walter and Mark Steilen, according to The Hollywood Reporter, with the aforementioned married couple and Dan Cortese
attached to produce. The story centers on a group of marginal, aging rock
session players who, because of a mix-up in their demo tape, end up
catching a record executive’s attention for a children’s song written on a lark, and finding unlikely success as a
Wiggles-type children’s band. Nice. I don’t even need Will Ferrell and more cowbell — without knowing anything else, give me Leoni, Duchovny, Jason Bateman and William H. Macy, and I’m there.
Angelina Jolie Replaces Tom Cruise, But Not in the Way Katie Holmes Hoped
Philip Noyce’s espionage thriller Edwin A. Salt is undergoing a gender change. According to Variety, Tom Cruise is out as its lead, and Angelina Jolie, who previously worked with Noyce on The Bone Collector, is all but officially in. A sort of on-the-lam, procedural actioner, one presumes, the movie is described as being about a CIA officer who’s accused by a defector of being a Russian sleeper
spy. He… errr, now she must elude capture long enough to establish her innocence. OK, a little bit The Fugitive, a little bit Breach, a little bit another movie I’m currently blanking on… I can get on board. One wonders, though, if the title will merely receive an extra vowel, or be reworked into something lame and anonymous. If they could somehow just come up with a justification for Salt Lick, the poster would make itself, and this thing would be huuuuge…
Eli Roth Is a Confirmed Bastard
Man, I could have fun with these casting update headlines until the polar icecaps refroze. While Michael Madsen may or may not be on the outside looking in, Eli Roth will join Quentin Tarantino’s Inglorious Bastards as a “baseball bat-swinging Nazi hunter,” according to Variety. No word yet on who will have the chainsaw, tire iron or candlestick.
Nicolas Cage May Be Scared Straight
He’s already teaming up with Werner Herzog for a remake of Abel Ferrera’s dark, druggy, schlong-baring Bad Lieutenant, but Nicolas Cage may also be joining forces with director John Carpenter to explore life behind bars. According to The Hollywood Reporter, the pair are in final negotiations to team up for a prison thriller titled Scared Straight, produced by Avi Lerner and others. The movie centers around a delinquent teenager who’s sent to prison for a short period of time as part of the same-named crime-prevention program, which angles to deter wrong-track kids from a life of crime. While the teen is there, a riot breaks out and prisoners take him hostage. A lifer, to be played by Cage, is forced to help the young man out. Let’s hope the title reaches and applies to this guy, too.
Michael Madsen May Not Be a Bastard
So with news swirling about studio suitors for Quentin Tarantino’s long-gestating, Nazi-scalping World War II epic Inglorious Bastards, which the filmmaker has of course promised to cast, shoot, edit and have ready to screen by next year’s Cannes Film Festival, I chatted Tuesday with Michael Madsen, the only actor who was ever “confirmed” to appear in the film — in the role of Babe Buchinsky, a part that no longer exists in the most recent draft of the script. A friend and frequent Tarantino collaborator ever since displaying one of cinema’s most enduring psychopathic jigs in Reservoir Dogs, Madsen certainly has the smoker’s growl to play a WWII grunt. But mo’ (studio) money may equal mo’ problems, it seems, at least for Madsen. For the full read, from New York Magazine‘s Vulture, click here.
Harold & Kumar 3 Given Green Light*
In what has to be considered good news for fans of both weed-sparked humor and Neil Patrick Harris, it’s being reported by Variety that Jon Hurwitz and Hayden Schlossberg, who wrote Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle and Harold & Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay, and directed the latter, will return as multi-hyphenates for a third installment in the outrageous comedy series.
Stars Kal Penn and John Cho (above, left to right) will reprise their roles as the ganja-loving duo, and Warner Bros., which absorbed New Line in February of this year, will likely distribute the third flick, to be produced by Mandate Pictures. This is the rare case of a financial no-brainer — the first film grossed $23 million worldwide on a $9 million budget, and was understandably a DVD smash, while the second installment pushed its cumulative haul to $40 million, with only a slip up-tick in cost — that also makes sense from a creative standpoint, given that Hurwitz and Schlossberg took so easily and breezily to life behind the camera. Yes, the movies are at their core basically just lewd, pot-infused, culturally-tweaked re-imaginations of The Odd Couple, but Hurwitz and Schlossberg exhibited a fairly deft touch with both topical political humor and cross-cut comedy of racial expectation, while keeping it all nicely rooted in character. Ideally this movie would be best served by a break of a couple years — allowing a new presidential administration to establish a foothold, and a slightly new tone of the country to be set — but of course the marketplace likely won’t allow that. So we’ll see what happens.
* – and by green I mean weed, see?
David Zucker Readies Michael Moore Takedown
David Zucker, the director and writer who helped create Airplane! and The Naked Gun
franchise, has called on Hollywood’s tiny but tightly knit Republican
A-list to help him craft a takedown of Michael Moore in the form of a broad yet unusually right-leaning
political satire titled An American Carol, according to Politico’s Jeffrey Ressner. Zucker and his associates have been keeping the film under fairly tight
wraps for months, avoiding any mention of its political perspective by describing the
movie to Hollywood trades in casting updates as only “a spoof of A Christmas Carol and contemporary American
culture.”
The low-budget indie co-stars Emmy winner Kelsey Grammer, with Jon Voight, Dennis Hopper, Paris Hilton and frequent Zucker stooge Leslie Nielsen in minor roles. Release is planned sometime by year’s end; the director, a self-described “Sept. 11 Republican,” suggested Friday, Sept. 12, to coincide with the seventh anniversary of the 2001 terrorist attacks. For more from the Politico, including plot specifics, click here.
Eugene Jarecki Goes Back to War
Director Eugene Jarecki, who previously delved into the military industrial complex in his award-winning documentary Why We Fight, will go back to war with his next project, according to The Hollywood Reporter. Pairing with screenwriter Jesse Wigutow, Jarecki will executive produce and direct, for HBO Films, Irreparable Harm, which details the personal and publishing history of Frank Snepp, the CIA’s chief strategy analyst in Saigon during the evacuation of American troops from Vietnam in 1975.
School of Rock 2 Set for 2010
Yep, the band is getting back together. The principal players behind 2003’s School of Rock — director Richard Linklater, screenwriter Mike White and star Jack Black — are reuniting for a sequel, according to Variety. School of Rock 2: America Rocks will picks up with Black’s Dewey Finn leading a
group of summer school students on a cross-country field trip that
delves into the history of rock ‘n’ roll, exploring the roots of jazz,
blues, rap, country and other musical genres. How the first film — freewheeling, both fun and comfortably familiar, and, to a certain degree, family-friendly — failed to crack $100 million domestically is God’s private mystery, but Paramount will now have a second crack at screwing things up.
Casting of Kate Hudson Will Not Force Me to Make Golf Pun
It doesn’t seem to matter that her movies attract shrugs of indifference like roosters attract junebugs — Kate Hudson has scored a major coup in securing a role in Nine, allegedly besting Sienna Miller and Anne Hathaway, among others, to win the role of Stephanie, a Vogue fashion journalist working in Italy, in director Rob Marshall’s new film.
Not to be confused with The Nines, the movie is an adaptation of the Tony Award-winning 1982 Broadway musical, adapted by Michael Tolkin (The Player) and the late Anthony Minghella, with music and lyrics by Maury Yeston, composer and lyricist for the original stage production. “We are thrilled that Kate Hudson is joining this group of some of the
most talented and creative actors in film, and it will be an incredible
experience for audiences to watch this cast work under the brilliant
direction of Rob Marshall,” said executive producer Harvey Weinstein in
a statement released today. “Inspired by one of cinema’s most profound
auteurs, Minghella’s dramatic writing and Marshall’s dynamic staging
will provide the actors with a daring opportunity to showcase their
artistic potential.”
Indeed, Hudson joins a host of Hollywood heavyweights, with Oscar winners Daniel Day-Lewis, Marion Cotillard, Nicole Kidman and Judi Dench all taking starring roles in the movie, inspired by Fellini’s classic 8 1/2. Described as a sultry and
enchanting musical about a famous film director struggling to find harmony amidst his tumultuous professional and personal lives, the film will star Day-Lewis as said famous director, Guido Contini; Cotillard as his wife, Luisa; Penelope Cruz as his sultry mistress, Carla; Kidman as his film star muse, Claudia Graham; Dench as Lily, his confidant and costume designer; and Sophia Loren as
his mother. The role of Saraghina, described as “the whore from Guido’s
youth,” is yet to be cast, so get those head shots in, ladies! Filming is scheduled to commence in the United Kingdom on October 10, with an expected awards-push release in late 2009.
Jon Favreau Inks For Iron Man 2
Deadline Hollywood Daily’s Nikki Finke is reporting that Jon Favreau is on board for the sequel to Iron Man, set to start prepping immediately, for a 2010 release.
Is Keira Knightley a Fair Lady?
Eliza Doolittle is set for another big screen makeover. Keira Knightley is eying a remake of My Fair Lady for producer Duncan Kenworthy and Columbia Pictures, according to Variety. While retaining the original musical’s score and setting, the filmmakers plan to adapt Alan Jay Lerner’s book more fully for the screen by drawing additional material from George Bernard Shaw’s play Pygmalion, which served as the source material for the original film.
Transformers 2 Nets Rainn Wilson
Jonah Hill is now out and The Office‘s Rainn Wilson is in, albeit in entirely different roles, on the just-underway sequel to Transformers, according to The Hollywood Reporter. Wilson will play a college professor to LaBeouf’s new undergrad in Michael Bay‘s bombastic action follow up to last summer’s biggest commercial hit. Filming began in Los Angeles a couple weeks
ago, will move to Pennsylvania next month, and then head overseas; release is set for next summer.
Sasha Grey Set for Girlfriend Experience?
A decently sourced tip came my way that 20-year-old adult film star Sasha Grey (below) is possibly set to star in Steven Soderbergh’s The Girlfriend Experience — his next down-and-dirty, HD-lensed flick, shot in the same seat-of-the-pants fashion as Full Frontal and Bubble.
I say possibly because depending on whom you believe she’s either already been cast, and the announcement is under wraps for reasons of publicity control, or it’s yet to be finalized. Either way, the fact that Grey is even under serious consideration for the role (Soderbergh previously indicated a desire to go with unknowns, while also mulling over an adult film starlet for the lead) while at the same time in the midst of what by all accounts is an ascendant career path in the flesh-pic biz makes for interesting theory and speculation. Other porn stars (notably Traci Lords, Ron Jeremy and of course now Jenna Jameson) have gone “legit,” but mostly toward the tail end of their on-camera careers, and with limited success or mainstream penetration. (Yeah, I went there.) Appearing in a movie for an Oscar-winning director — no matter how much of a niche market one-off it is — is a no-brainer for Grey, I get it, but this is all perhaps most interesting for the manner in which it actualizes the merging of American narrative film and the sensory-overload pleasures of adult flicks, which long ago pervaded Hollywood action cinema.
Set for simultaneous distribution across various platforms, as with Bubble, the ultra-low-budget, Los Angeles-set movie will examine the world of a $10,000-a-pop call girl (presumably, Soderbergh pal Julia Roberts will not cameo), and the stable of regular clients who pay for her company. Soderbergh will shot the movie — hashed out with screenwriters Brian Koppelman and David Levien during the shoot for Ocean’s Thirteen — later this fall, after wrapping up the very Michael Clayton-sounding The Informant, starring Matt Damon, for Warner Bros.
Uwe Boll Preps Movie About Sudanese Genocide
Perhaps the last person one would expect to be following in the activist-filmmaking footsteps of George Clooney and Don Cheadle is a filmmaker being
rabidly petitioned online to get out of making movies altogether. And yet Uwe Boll is hoping to exercise his social conscience by making a “very brutal” movie about the Sudanese genocide, “in the style of Mel Gibson’s Apocalypto.” For more, from FilmStew, click here.
Unthinkable Becomes Reality
The favorite what-if scenario of ultra-right-wing nutters will get its day in Unthinkable, which centers on a major threat to the United States involving three nuclear devices whose locations are shrouded in secrecy by a single terrorist. With only two days before they are deployed, a black-ops interrogator and a female FBI agent have to decide how far they will go to find them. Variety reports that Buffalo Soldiers helmer Gregor Jordan will direct, and Samuel L. Jackson will star (presumably as the black-ops interrogator, not the female FBI agent, which will be, I don’t know, Julianne Moore? Rachel Weisz? Rachel McAdams?)
While this will surely, finally give the talking heads at Fox News something other than 24 and Jack Bauer to reference, given the conceit, the guy-and-gal commercial concession and, I’m sad to say, the involvement of Jackson, does anyone doubt that this movie is going to suck in dispiriting ways? Jackson only tries in approximately every fourth film (the last time was in Resurrecting the Champ… though I haven’t seen Renny Harlin’s direct-to-DVD Cleaner), and everything about this reads phone-it-in, gun-waving, loud-authoritative-voice-using Jackson, which we’ve seen approximately two dozen times before. Can’t wait for the water-boarding recreations set to Hans Zimmer music, though. Oh wait… yes I can.
Gore Verbinski Goes Into Bioshock
So a day after an interview for a forthcoming piece with Uwe Boll in which the German filmmaker jokingly talked about the possibility of adapting the videogame Bioshock comes word, via Variety, that Gore Verbinski — he of the bloated Pirates of the Caribbean franchise — has signed to bring the hit videogame to the big screen, in a big deal for Universal. Bioshock publisher Take-Two Interactive is getting a multi-million-dollar advance against gross points on the picture, believed to be the biggest videogame deal since 2005, when Microsoft scored $5 million against 10 percent of the gross for the since abandoned big screen adaptation of the best-selling Halo series. Aviator scribe John Logan, meanwhile, is in talks to pen the Bioshock screenplay, presumably without consulting Boll.
David Lynch Catches Big Fish in Form of Road Movie
So in what sounds like a brief, walking-through-the-lobby-type interview with Hollywood Today, David Lynch announced that he’s working on Catching the Big Fish, a road movie-style documentary that’s an outgrowth of his best-selling book and consciousness-touting seminars about transcendental meditation. Shot around meaning-of-life dialogues with both seminar companions like ’60s troubadour Donovan and physicist John Hagelin, as well as regular folks, the world-spanning movie sounds like part peace-pitch, part typically elliptical, Lynchian inquisition into global measures of anxiety. No timetable for completion or anything of that nature was discussed.
“People have a right to be happy, but they don’t know it,” says Lynch. “A lot of artists are attached to the idea that to create one must suffer and live in pain. I used to have a lot of anger and depression, but when you have a constant migraine you can’t create anything, and transcendental meditation really taught me that.” For more information on the David Lynch Foundation for Consciousness-Based Education and World Peace, click here.
Jonah Hill Set to Transform?
So Jonah Hill, who broke big in Superbad and recently popped up in Forgetting Sarah Marshall, trading on the same sort of man-crush riff that he worked into Evan Almighty, is allegedly set to join Shia LaBeouf in the sequel to Transformers, according to an “early negotiations” leak sourced to Nicole Sperling at Entertainment Weekly. For the moment Michael Bay is denying casting/character reports, but that’s what you do when something like this breaks, right? Rightly or wrongly, this sentiment is already bubbling to the surface, and I can tell you that this news, if/when true, will likely prove a jump-the-shark moment for Hill, who needs a reinvention… already, at age 24. Transformers 2 certainly won’t give him an opportunity to do anything different (squint and you can already see him — bewildered, sardonic, chubby, rocking the porkpie hat), and when it does the requisite huge business, the Internet haters will crawl out from behind their computers with pitchforks, and convince their more genteel moviegoer friends to turn on this guy as well.
Jason Bateman Samples Extract
Jason Bateman has signed on to topline the new comedy from Beavis and Butt-Head and Office Space creator Mike Judge, according to The Hollywood Reporter. Entitled Extract, the film centers around a flower extract plant owner dealing with workplace issues and a stream of bad luck, including his wife’s affair with a gigolo (hopefully not portrayed by Rob Schneider). North American distribution rights have been snapped up by Miramax, which has a notoriously deep shelf, even post-Weinsteins; hopefully the movie gets treated better than Judge’s Idiocracy, which saw a corporate-snuffed micro-release from 20th Century Fox in 2006.