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In August, five actresses were in contention for one of two female roles in Universal's upcoming sci-fi epic Horizons (formerly titled Oblivion), a role that was eventually won by Jessica Chastain (The Help, The Tree of Life). The movie stars Tom Cruise as a lonely man named Jack who repairs the drones that fight aliens on the planet's surface in a post-apocalyptic future.
Deadline reports that Hayley Atwell (Captain America), Diane Kruger (Inglourious Basterds), and Kate Beckinsale (Underworld) are all traveling to Pittsburgh this weekend to read for the role with Cruise, who is currently shooting the adaptation of One Shot in the city. According to the report, the actresses are vying for the role of a mysterious young woman who crash lands on Earth, much to Cruise's surprise, which would mean that Chastain has been cast as Julia, Jack's fiancee on Earth before the alien invasion.
washington gets Unchained >> Posted 10.27.11 by Ryan -
It looks like Academy Award–winning talent is interested in being involved in comic book movies. After all, this summer's Thor starred Academy Award–winning actor Anthony Hopkins and was directed by Academy Award–nominated director Kenneth Branagh (Henry V) while Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight was nominated for eight Academy Awards, winning two.
Still, it seemed curious when it was announced in August that Academy Award–winning screenwriter William Monahan (The Departed) had been hired to rewrite the script for a comic book movie sequel, Sin City 2. Sin City actress Jaime King later confirmed Monahan's hiring, after fans had become dubious of the news without any confirmation. To be fair, fans have become doubtful of any news regarding Sin City 2 since word of the sequel has been ongoing without any progress since the original movie was released in 2005.
In a recent interview with Collider, Monahan described how he was brought on board Sin City 2, which will again be directed by Robert Rodriguez.
more about Sin City 2 and a Departed sequel >> Posted 10.19.11 by Ryan -
Since comic book adaptation Sin City was released in 2005, a sequel has been teased for years, and teased, and teased some more. Just recently director Robert Rodriguez revealed that "the time is finally coming" for Sin City 2, and it looks like the script will get some help from an Academy Award–winning screenwriter.
THR reports that William Monahan, who wrote the screenplay for 2006's The Departed, has been hired to work on the script, originally written by Frank Miller and based on elements of the comic book writer and artist's Sin City story "A Dame to Kill For."
What else did rodriguez say? >> Posted 08.29.11 by Ryan -
2006's The Departed was, at the time, the third collaboration between director Martin Scorsese and actor Leonardo DiCaprio. The movie, a remake of the Hong Kong thriller Infernal Affairs, won Academy Awards for both Scorsese and screenwriter William Monahan.
Since The Departed, the actor and director have also worked on last year's Shutter Island, and the pair are looking to reunite for a fifth time with a remake of the gritty, 1974 drama The Gambler. Deadline reports that Monahan is writing the script for Paramount for Scorsese with DiCaprio now attached to star. The original starred James Caan as a professor whose addiction to gambling gets the better of him and flees to Las Vegas to escape the mob.
While fans of The Departed have to be pleased at the potential of a re-teaming between the movie's screenwriter, director and star of the original movie, there is one person who isn't happy about the remake at all: The Gambler screenwriter James Toback. Toback sent Deadline a message outlining his displeasure over the remake, which no one had bothered to tell him about.
toback not pleased with the "rudeness" of the remake >> Posted 08.29.11 by Ryan -
Director Joseph Kosinski is following his feature debut of Tron: Legacy with another futuristic adventure based on his as-yet-unpublished, illustrated, sci-fi graphic novel Oblivion. Due to the popular video game Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, Universal is titling the movie Horizons.
Tom Cruise is set to star in Horizons, playing a man named Jack who repairs the drones that fight the aliens who have already destroyed most of humanity. Variety reports that five actresses have tested for the movie, including Jessica Chastain (The Help, The Tree of Life), Olivia Wilde (Tron: Legacy, Cowboys and Aliens), Brit Marling (Another Earth), Noomi Rapace (The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo) and Olga Kurylenko (Quantum of Solace). The actresses are testing for two key female roles — Jack's lover and right-hand woman Victoria, and Julia, Jack's fiancee on Earth before the invasion. Wilde would seem to have an advantage after working with Kosinski on Tron: Legacy, but nothing is certain.
Universal has been saying "no" to plenty of projects of late, including director McG's adaptation of Ouija, as well as passing on director Ron Howard's ambitious adaptation of Stephen King's epic Dark Tower series, but seems confident about Horizons, which already has a release date of July 19, 2013. William Monahan (The Departed) and Karl Gadjusek wrote the script, with Michael Arndt recently performing a script "polish".
Wilde to replace Garner in Chemistry; Lo Pan Searches for green eyes in R.I.P.D. >> Posted 08.26.11 by Ryan -
Disney is moving forward with its plans to adapt Tron: Legacy director Joseph Kosinski's as-yet-unpublished 128-page illustrated sci-fi novel, Oblivion. Kosinski offered Disney a first look at the novel last month and "The House of Mouse" quickly snatched up the rights to it. Now, Deadline has reported that Disney has hired Academy Award-winning screenwriter, William Monahan (The Departed), to adapt Oblivion for the big screen. Though Monahan has not previously tackled sci-fi, Oblivion is essentially a story about long-lost lovers on the run. It only happens to be set on a decimated near-future Earth populated by clones. Kosinski is producing with Radical's Barry Levine also attached to direct.
Posted 09.14.10 by BrentJS -
Not to spoil the ending of 2006's The Departed, but for those who haven't seen it, let's just say that a sequel seems rather unlikely. However, The Departed was based on the Hong Kong thriller Infernal Affairs, which received both a prequel in Infernal Affairs II and a sequel/prequel with Infernal Affairs III.
So how realistic is a Departed sequel? Speaking with Collider in 2007, screenwriter William Monahan said a potential Departed sequel wouldn't follow the story of it's Hong Kong counterpart, but declared it a possibility.
What does Monaghan say about returning to The Departed >> Posted 06.16.10 by Ryan -
Not many directors get to make a TV mini-series and then create a movie based on the same material 25 years later, but that's exactly what Martin Campbell has done with Edge of Darkness. The director spoke with ComingSoon about why he returned to the story so many years later.
What happened was that someone suggested making it into a movie way back in 2000, and I was kind of lukewarm about it. I thought, "Oh, well ... maybe they can get some money to develop the thing," and over the next five or six years, a writer called Andrew Bovell, a very good writer from Australia, sort of whittled it down from six hours to where it is now, a two-hour movie. I was doing other projects, Casino" [Royale] amongst them, and this was being developed as it were behind me, and then at about the sixth draft, it was shaping up pretty well, and I read it, and I had just met Graham King and had suggested it to him, and he said, "Look, I'll finance it, because I love the series," so he did. I sent it to Mel [Gibson], and Mel was kind of interested. We then got Bill Monahan to do the final two drafts of the movie, and Mel was on board, so it all came together basically.
Campbell admits he treated Edge of Darkness as a "completely separate" movie from the TV series, though besides moving from England to Boston and losing some of the political backstory of "Thatcher's England," Campbell says the two iterations of the story are still similar.
Clearly you have to lose a lot of stuff when you reduce six hours down. Thecharacters that remain are the leads, which is Jedburgh (Ray Winstone) and Craven (Gibson), and all the emotional stakes in the movie are identical to the series, i.e. a police detective whose daughter is murdered and he sets out todiscover who was responsible. The kind of emotional spine of the story is identical to the series.
Gibson's role of Detective Thomas Craven is his first since 2002's Signs, having been busying himself by directing movies like Passion of the Christ and Apocalypto. Campbell says Gibson approached the process simply as an actor.
He simply said at the beginning of the movie: "Look, I'm just an actor. I'm not a director, I'm not a producer, I'm none of that. I simply want to act in this and that's what we're doing." He made it very clear up front that that's what his role was.
Posted 01.25.10 by Ryan -
Mel Gibson and his production company, Icon Entertainment, may be co-producing the upcoming Mad Max 4, but there's no word if Gibson will appear in the movie. Gibson spoke to Collider about the project, but didn't exactly clear up the confusion.
I've talked to [director] George [Miller] [about Mad Max 4] ... yeah. We talk all the time anyway. I'm abreast of that. He's been trying to do this for years — the 4th installment. At one point I was involved and it fell to bits and then this and that ... so now it's probably gone through a lot of changes and I can't wait to see it cause everything he does is magic. There is a touch of genius about George.
While it doesn't sound like Mel will play a role in the sequel, it doesn't exactly close the door either. While Gibson didn't speak about his next starring role in How I Spent My Summer Vacation, which is drawing protests in Mexico, he did open up about his next directorial project, which will be an untitled movie about Vikings written by The Departed screenwriter William Monahan (who also wrote Gibson's upcoming Edge of Darkness) and starring Leonardo DiCaprio.
[Next,] I'm working with [producer] Graham [King] on the Viking movie. The very first idea I ever had about making a film ... my first thought about ever being a filmmaker was when I was sixteen years old and I wanted to make a Viking movie. And I wanted to make it in old Norse, which I was studying at the time. It's odd because at that age that's a stupidly ridiculous idea cause how will I ever be a filmmaker. It's just some kind of romantic pipe dream. But that was the first big, epic, wacky idea I ever had was to show Viking real.
I think it's going to be [in] English — the English that would have been spoken back then — and Old Norse. Whatever the 9th century had to offer. I'm going to give you real.
Going back to the original dialect will be a key for the movie, Gibson revealed.
I want a Viking to scare you. I don't want a Viking to say, "I'm going to die with a sword in my hand." I don't want to hear that. It pulls the rug out from under you. I want to see somebody who I have never seen before speaking low guttural German who scares the living s**t out of me coming up to my house. What is that like? What would that have been like?
Posted 01.18.10 by Ryan -
Director Martin Campbell's (Casino Royale) latest film, Edge of Darkness, marks the return of Mel Gibson as a leading man, his first such performance since M. Night Shyamalan's Signs in 2002.
Based on Campbell's BBC mini-series of the same name, Darkness tells the story of veteran policeman Thomas Craven (Gibson), who obsessively investigates the shooting death of his daughter on their front steps. In the process, he uncovers far more than he bargained for.
Edge of Darkness was written for the screen by Academy Award-winner William Monahan (The Departed) and also stars Ray Winstone and Danny Huston.
Posted 10.16.09 by BrentJS