Also in Tuesday afternoon’s round-up of news briefs: Oscar-nominated filmmaker Frank Darabont will receive an upcoming festival tribute. South Korea’s Oscar entry Pietà heads to U.S. theaters. And a sci-fi thriller will also make its way to U.S. audiences. Marion Cotillard to Receive Tribute at 22nd Annual Gotham Awards The Best Actress winner will be honored at the IFP Gotham Independent Film Awards on November 26th in New York City. Cotillard stars in French director Jacques Audiard’s Rust and Bone alongside Matthias Schoenaerts, Bouli Lanners and Céline Sallette. The French actress joins previously announced Tributes Actor, Matt Damon; Director, David O. Russell and Philanthropist and Social Entrepreneur, Jeff Skoll. Ben Affleck Eyes Warner Bros’ Focus Glenn Ficarra and John Requa wrote and will direct the project. “The story centers on a veteran con man who gets involved with a newcomer to the grifter business. They become involved romantically but that becomes perilous in a business where they lie and cheat for a living. The complications of the encounter haunt them when they meet up again in the future,” Deadline reports . Austin Film Festival to Fete Frank Darabont The three-time Oscar-nominated filmmaker of The Shawshank Redemption and The Green Mile director will receive the festival’s “2012 Extraordinary Contribution to Filmmaking Award” October 20th. This year’s Conference at AFF includes over 80 panels, workshops and roundtable discussions led by more than 100 professionals in the television and film industries. The 19th Austin Film Festival takes place October 18 – 25. Doc NYC Returns for 3rd Year The opening night will feature Jared Leto presenting Artifact (dir. Bartholomew Cubbins) which follows his band Thirty Seconds to Mars as they battle a lawsuit against record label EMI. Also opening is Venus and Serena (dirs. Michelle Major and Maiken Baird), an intimate look at the lives of the tennis-conquering Williams sisters. The festival, taking place November 8 – 15, will feature 115 films and events. Expected guests include Rufus Wainwright, Pete Seeger, Andy Summers, Ice-T, Antony Hegarty, David Bromberg, Ken Burns, Alex Gibney, Rory Kennedy, Jonathan Demme, Barbara Kopple, Joe Berlinger, Radioman and more. For more details on the lineup, visit their website . South Korean Oscar Entry Pietà heads to U.S. Theaters Auteur Kim Ki-Duk’s ( 3-Iron ) latest was chosen by S. Korea as its entry for Best Foreign-Language Oscar consideration. Pietà tells the uncompromising story of a loan shark who is forced to reconsider his violent lifestyle after the arrival of a mysterious woman claiming to be his long-lost mother. Drafthouse Films picked up North American rights to the film and plans a limited theatrical and multi-platform VOD release for Pietà in 2013. Justin Dix’s Crawlspace Heads to U.S. Theaters The sci-fi thriller centers around a group of elite soldiers infiltrate Australia’s top secret military compound. They quickly discover all is not as it seems and the facility is a testing ground for something far more sinister. IFC Midnight, which picked up North American rights to the film, will take Crawlspace to ScreamFest on October 18th.
Indie auteur Joe Swanberg has established himself as the reigning poster child of mumblecore, for better or worse , but as the most surprising filmmaker contributing to the Sundance hit horror anthology V/H/S (in theaters Friday) he begins branching out of his comfort zone with a newfound energy; his entry, The Sick Thing That Happened To Emily When She Was Younger , was filmed using Skype — and a script! — and is also one of the more memorable and inventive shorts in the midnight crowd-pleasing omnibus. Between his V/H/S segments (he also acts in Ti West ‘s road trip gone horribly wrong) and the forthcoming Drinking Buddies , which blends his improvisational style and mainstream stars Anna Kendrick and Olivia Wilde, Swanberg says he sees 2012 as a turning point in his creative evolution. “I feel like I’m ready to be a filmmaker,” he declared to Movieline. Read on for more with Swanberg on how he and West accomplished a lot with very little for V/H/S , why acting in Adam Wingard’s Your Next reinvigorated him as a director, and how his Drinking Buddies stars took to the Swanberg method. You’re involved in two of the segments that most scared me, so well done. How did you first get recruited for V/H/S as a director and as an actor in Ti West’s short? I might venture to say that you out of the entire slate of filmmakers are not so much, or at all, thought of as a horror filmmaker. I would agree! One of the cool things about V/H/S is I think it’s one of the first times it’s actually visible how interconnected the independent film world is, and how easily it crosses genres. I think there was a perception for a long time of mumblecore being this very inclusive little group of [Andrew] Bujalski or Aaron Katz and the Duplasses and I or something, and that the horror world did its own thing and the documentary world did its own thing. But all of us have been friends for a really long time and we just make different kinds of movies. I think Simon Barrett and Adam Wingard went to bat for me as a director for V/H/S , and it helped that [producer] Roxanne Benjamin had seen some of my other films. But I acted in Ti [West]’s first, so that was my first involvement in the project. He shot his in May and I didn’t shoot mine until August, so it was a while where I feel like Adam and Simon were lobbying for me to get the chance to do one of these. Simon wrote your segment, which makes your V/H/S segment the first time you’ve directed something you haven’t written yourself. Not only is it the first time that I’ve directed something I haven’t written, it’s also the first time that I’ve directed something that was scripted. My own films are all improvised. So it was really fun for me to play with somebody else’s material. And Simon wrote it knowing that I was going to direct it and I think he expected that I would just throw the script away once we started, but I actually really loved his script and thought it was a good first chance to go ahead and do that. Your segment uses a Skype chat as its set up for tension; we watch as Emily (Helen Rodgers, pictured with Swanberg above) experiences something strange as she chats online with her boyfriend. How did you fake it, or did you? For V/H/S we actually just used Skype, we didn’t fake it. I did a bunch of research into the best way to fake it and I realized the best way was not to fake it. We were going to build this crazy, elaborate rig with multiple cameras that were connected to each other, and the more I looked at it and researched screen capture stuff I realized we could do high definition screen capturing and actually record live Skype conversations. So it’s a film made without a camera – laptops were our cameras. But you used lighting rigs and such? Adam Wingard DPed my segment and I wouldn’t describe it as a typical lighting set-up but it was modified for our purposes. Adam was usually moving with Helen – the other funny thing is because it’s a real Skype conversation, Helen was the camera operator, essentially. She not only had to act, she was in charge of what was seen and what wasn’t seen. So we had to do pretty elaborate choreography about where and when to turn the computer, when to set it on the bed, all these sorts of things, and Adam was usually following her off-camera with lights. The computer gives off a decent glow so we had some light motivated by the computer but we also had back-up lights, and the cool effect of that is, because it’s a real Skype conversation, one of the reasons we decided it had to be real Skype was that every time it gets bright on Helen’s screen you actually see that reflected on Daniel’s screen. If it wasn’t a real Skype conversation it’d be really difficult to get those lighting rigs set up right, but it’s fun to watch and it adds to the realism because when Helen turns on a light on, Daniel’s room brightens as well. It felt almost like directing dance. And we ended up editing after the fact but most of the takes are long, unbroken, four or five minute takes involving starting in the bedroom and going out to the living room, or weaving around the kitchen, so we had to light and choreograph these long 360 set-ups. That’s pretty fantastic a feat to pull off. In Ti’s segment you acted and also operated the camera, home video-style. It’s cool to see performers having to innovate and actually work with the technology, whether in laptop or camcorder form. One of the cool things about this project was the chance to do that. I’ve used Skype before in Young American Bodies , the webseries I do – we recorded a few scenes in that which were like Skype conversations – but outside of that it becomes really gimmicky if you were to do a whole feature film based around Skype or iChat. That becomes the thing. And one of the great opportunities of VHS is I feel like all the directors were liberated to play around with ideas that might not hold up for a feature running time but that work as shorts. The Skype thing was really fun when I realized that people only have to watch it for 20 minutes, and not for an hour and a half. Well, now Paranormal Activity 4 is running with the Skype thing. I’m not saying they copied you, but yours did come first… [Laughs] I know those guys, and I doubt that they’ve seen V/H/S . It’s unlikely that it influenced them. I don’t know when they shot that movie… In Ti’s segment, what did you actually shoot on and how difficult was it to be mindful of your performance and operating the camera at the same time? I forget the model of the camera we used but it was a little handheld portable – Ti did a bunch of research on cameras. We needed one with a light, because some of the real scary things about Ti’s are when the light switches on in the hotel room from the camera. As an actor it was a fun challenge to have to be mindful of that stuff, and it’s helpful in a way because one of the difficult things about acting especially when the goal is naturalism or realism is to not overthink it. You have to just be in a situation and react. So having the camera and having something to do with my hands that was occupying my brain I think made it easier for me performance wise to react to Sophia [Takal] and be in those scenes. It’s a much different experience than having a crew and a camera pointed at my face feeling like, ‘Okay, here’s the big moment – now act natural,’ with 30 people watching and we only get to do it two times so get it right. Both you and Ti seemed to pull off these segments using so few resources. These must be two of the most affordable short films ever made. Yeah, especially going to Sundance with V/H/S was really crazy – Ti’s and my segments were not the most effects-heavy of the bunch. The Radio Silence one at the end has a lot of really amazing visual effects, and David Bruckner’s, they built that monster creature and Glenn McQuaid’s has that video killer. Ours have pretty much practical effects. But all of them were really affordable. Even the super effects-heavy ones were made on moderate budgets, so it was great to go to Sundance and have the movie feel big despite the fact that it’s a low budget movie. In your career so far you’ve made so many films in such a short time – you’re one of the busiest filmmakers around, especially since you’re not only directing movies, you’re also acting in other people’s films. How do you feel like 2012 Joe Swanberg is most changed from 2005 Joe Swanberg? Starting with going to Sundance with V/H/S , I’m having the time of my life in 2012. It’s been the best, most fun year of my life as a filmmaker and it’s because I feel like I’m doing so much outside of what I’m typically known for. All the movies that I made in 2010 and 2011 when I was hyper-productive, that was sort of my last big push almost as a student; I was making a lot of work in an effort to keep getting better as a filmmaker and keep pushing myself to try things I hadn’t done before. Now I feel like with V/H/S and Drinking Buddies , which I just finished and stars Olivia Wilde and Anna Kendrick and Jake Johnson and Ron Livingston – it’s a much bigger production than I’ve done before – I feel like I’m ready to… be a filmmaker. I’m embracing being a director and what that means. Obviously I’ll be practicing and learning my whole life, but I feel like the kind of workmanlike attitude I’ve had the last couple of years is paying off now in the sense that I’m getting to put that practice into bigger productions that are being seen by more people. Do you feel like this evolution is marked in your process, or your creative choices? It’s in both, actually. A big turning point for me came when I was acting in You’re Next , Adam and Simon’s movie. Getting to be on the set of not a big budget movie, but one much bigger than the ones I make, and seeing Adam, who I’ve worked with really closely on $10,000 movies directing a much bigger movie with a full-sized crew and 20 actors and all these elaborate action sequences, I realized I’m interested in challenging and pushing myself. I don’t just want to shoot conversations in apartments. It would behoove me as a filmmaker, I realized, to know how to do that other stuff. Even if I never make an action movie it would be useful as a director to know how to shoot an action sequence. So I came away from that acting experience feeling energized as a director, to try new things. And V/H/S was the first thing I did. After that I went with an attitude of, like, cool – here’s an opportunity for me to do something I’ve never done before and to really mess it up. Not take the easy route. Figure out how to do this camera work and figure out how to do special effects and really make something that’s going to push me out of my comfort zone. And did that extend to Drinking Buddies ? The same was true with Drinking Buddies , which was still improvised but improvised on a much bigger level, with a full crew that I had to learn to work with. I basically took the process that I normally use with three actors and two crew and do it with 20 actors and a 40-person crew. I’m looking for those challenges now. I’m looking to broaden my spectrum a bit. Drinking Buddies is your biggest movie to date, and it features mainstream actors – how did they adjust to your process? You’ve practically established your own indie subgenre working in a specific style and with regular collaborators. When you were casting did you find that many mainstream actors fell into step with your sensibilities? I went into the casting with the same attitude that I’ve used to cast all of my movies with my friends, which is, who are these people? Are they easy to talk to? Do they have interesting lives and things they’re interested in outside of acting that we can use in the movie? Are they fun to be around? It really was almost the identical process, and the result was I ended up with more people who I love and who gave amazing performances and who are totally ready to show up and figure it out every day. It’s possible they were intimidated by the situation but they never let on. They were really excited to collaborate with me and create these characters. I’m deep into editing right now, and the performances are amazing. Everybody’s going to look at these actors in a new way because of this movie – they’re all really alive in an exciting way. So it’s given me confidence to keep doing this and to feel like I can work with bigger name actors, and that the process isn’t antithetical to the kind of work I’ve been doing in the past or that they’ve been doing. What did you learn about Anna and Jake and Olivia that you then integrated into their characters? All of them, the way that I like to work is that everybody is kind of playing a version of themselves. I write characters and create a very simple set-up, and with the actors I flesh it out. There’s not one specific thing I could point to other than to say when you watch this movie you’ll be watching a really interesting hybrid of my ideas that I came into the movie with and their personalities that they brought to it. There’s a lot of acting happening, and there’s a lot of real stories being told. As is always the goal, I feel like I came out of the film feeling these people were my friends and not just actors I hired for a movie. We all learned a lot about each other during the shoot because that’s how the process works. The more everybody shares, the better the movie is and also the easier it is to create these relationships that don’t actually exist in real life. Side note: I noticed that when you announced your cast for Drinking Buddies you earned a mention on Perez Hilton. Was that the moment when you realized you’d made it in Hollywood? I actually wasn’t aware of that! One of the things about making movies that people started to watch and write about is that they also write mean things a lot of the time. [Laughs] I’ve been pretty disconnected for the past couple of years from any of the press stuff surrounding the movies, so I typically hear about it via friends. I certainly never go looking for it anymore. But now I know! V/H/S is in select theaters Friday. Follow Jen Yamato on Twitter . Follow Movieline on Twitter .
Download my new album on iTunes: bit.ly GOING ON TOUR: www.tylerwardmusic.com Help support independent music and download this song on iTunes here: bit.ly My my my! It’s been less than 24 hours since this track has been released! Long day, but worth it! So thankful for my talented friends for helping me finish this song on time! Make sure you check out Jameson’s channel when you get a sec. This dude is legit. He helped engineer and produce this project!!! Youtube: www.youtube.com Facebook: www.youtube.com Twitter: @SongsWFriends Also, a huge thanks to my video team, all the way from the UK, Shaun Reynolds and his best friend Eppic. Check out their channels here: Shaun: www.youtube.com Eppic: www.youtube.com A generous thanks to the other folks who appeared in this video: Derek Ward: www.youtube.com Black Prez: www.youtube.com Song recorded @ Tyler Ward Studios (www.tylerwardmusic.com Engineered and co-produced by Tyler Ward and Jameson Bass Song Mixed by Tyler Ward Video Shot by Shaun Reynolds and Eppic Video edited by Tyler Ward ‘Boyfriend’ originally by Justin Bieber Written by: Mike Posner, Mat Musto, Mason Levy & Justin Bieber Published by: Universal Music Publishing, WB Music Corp & Sony ATV Music Publishing http://www.youtube.com/v/iDmsJdW-OZo?version=3&f=videos&app=youtube_gdata The rest is here: Boyfriend – Justin Bieber – Cover By Tyler Ward – Official Cover Music Video – On iTunes
Also in Wednesday morning’s round-up of news briefs, Brazil makes a move to ban Anti-Islamic film in its borders. After Rupert Wyatt exits Dawn of the Planet of the Apes , Fox comes up with possible short-list. And an aging gay drama set for New York Film Festival premiere becomes the Philippines’ entry for Oscar. Disney’s Lone Ranger Shoot Nears Completion The film starring Johnny Depp and directed by Gore Verbinski ( Pirates of the Caribbean ) began shooting at the end of February and should wrap up at the end of September, for a total of between 140 – 150 days. The budget is said to be $250 million for the action movie, THR reports . More Innocence of Muslims Fallout: Brazil Orders YouTube To Remove Pic A Brazilian court ordered YouTube to pull the video. Brazil’s National Islamic Union said posting the video was a violation of the constitutional right to freedom of religion. In issuing the order, however, the judge said that banning something shouldn’t “offend” freedom of thought and expression. In related news, Iran made official that it will boycott this year’s Oscars, Deadline reports . Possible Short List for Fox’s Dawn of the Planet of the Apes Director The studio may have a short list of directors to replace Rupert Wyatt who left the project. Among the names in the list are Cloverfield ‘s Matt Reeves, The Disappearance of Alice Creed director J. Blakeson, 28 Days Later director Juan Carlos Fresnadillio, Pacific Rim ‘s Guillermo del Toro and Looper ‘s Rian Johnson, Deadline reports . Barry Sonnenfeld Eyes Warner Bros. Lore Dwayne Johnson is set to star in the sic-fi action pic, while Sonnenfeld is in talks to direct the feature. It is based on a IDW book/graphic novel by Ashely Wood and T.P. Louise and has been described as Men in Black with mythological creatures.” Sonnenfeld recently made Men in Black 3 , THR reports . Drama on Aging Gay is Philippines’ Oscar Entry Writer/director Jun Robles Lana’s Bwakaw (Voracious) is an indie drama that explores “loneliness and missed opportunities” of an ailing 70 year-old gay man. Bwakaw will screen at the upcoming New York Film Festival, opening Friday, A.P. reports .
Also in Wednesday afternoon’s round-up of news briefs, recent Toronto International Film Festival Gala Inescapable is headed to U.S. theaters. Tech and media moguls are among Forbes ‘ list of America’s richest individuals. And, an actress of the video at the center of rage among some Muslims worldwide, Innocence of Muslims is suing the film’s producer and YouTube. Tom Hanks’ Saving Mr. Banks Heads into Production in L.A. The story is an account of Walt Disney’s twenty-year pursuit of the film rights to P.L. Travers’ popular novel, Mary Poppins , and the testy partnership he develops with the uptight author during the project’s pre-production in 1961. Two-time Academy Award®-winner Tom Hanks will portray Disney (the first time he has ever been depicted in a dramatic film) alongside fellow double Oscar®-winner Emma Thompson in the role of the prickly novelist. Daniel Craig, Quentin Tarantino Among BAFTA Los Angeles Honorees Craig, Tarantino along with Trey Parker, Matt Stone and Will Wright will be among the recipients of the 2012 BAFTA Los Angeles Britannia Awards on November 7th. Craig will receive the Britannia Award for British Artist of the Year, while BAFTA Award-winning director Quentin Tarantino will receive the John Schlesinger Britannia Award for Excellence in Directing. Trey Parker and Matt Stone, will receive the Charlie Chaplin Britannia Award for Excellence in Comedy. Video game designer Will Wright will receive the Albert R. Broccoli Britannia Award for Worldwide Contribution to Entertainment. Inescapable Heads to U.S. Theaters The thriller starring Alexander Siddig, Joshua Jackson and Marisa Tomei screened as a Gala at the recent Toronto International Film Festival. Directed by Canadian-based filmmaker Ruba Nadda ( Cairo Time ), Inescapable revolves around a Syrian expatriate (Siddig) whose journalist daughter goes missing in Damascus. He returns to his homeland to find her, despite the risks, and calls on a former love (Tomei) to help him, as well as an embassy official (Jackson) who is helpful at first, but may have an agenda of his own. IFC Films acquired the title from Myriad Pictures. Alliance Films is distributing in Canada. Around the ‘net… Forbes’ List of Richest Americans Filled with Tech and Media Moguls America’s richest man is still Bill Gates (at $66 billion) followed by Warren Buffet ($46 billion). Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg fell to 36th on the list, tying with News Corp’s Rupert Mrudoch at $9.4 billion. Others on the list, David Geffen (57th at $5.6 billion), Viacom and CBS chairman Sumner Redstone (91st at $4.1 billion), George Lucas (120th at $3.3 billion) and Steven Spielberg (125th at $3.2 billion), Deadline reports . Innocence of Muslims Actress Sues Producer and YouTube Cindy Lee Garcia, an actress at the firestorm of controversy throughout the Muslim world igniting violent demonstrations has filed a complaint in L.A. Superior Court agains the film’s producer, Nakoula Basseley Nakoula (aka Sam Bacile) saying she was duped into appearing in the film. She is also going after YouTube and its owner Google for refusing to take the video down, THR reports .
Making his first press appearance since that headline-grabbing Republican National Convention speech , Clint Eastwood laughed off his rambling, off-the-cuff missive to an invisible Obama. “It didn’t get the response I wanted,” joked the 82 year-old actor and filmmaker at a press conference for his upcoming baseball flick Trouble With The Curve , “because I was hoping they’d nominate me.” Eastwood’s been around the block long enough in the film (and politics) game to acquit himself well with charming self-deprecation. But as the line of questioning briefly veered from his turn as an aging MLB scout to his now-infamous rambling RNC appearance (which he discussed with hometown paper The Carmel Pine Cone the other week ), audible groans seemed to come from the direction of the publicists in the room. Unperturbed, Eastwood explained what he’d been trying to convey when he improvised an exchange with an empty chair on the RNC stage: “My only message was [that] I wanted people to take the idolizing factor out of every contestant out there. Just look at the work, look at the background, and then make a judgment on that. I was just trying to say that, and did it in kind of a roundabout way which took a lot more time, I suppose, than they would have liked.” A journalist asked if Eastwood would give the same speech if he could go back and do it all over again. “I’d probably say something else,” Eastwood admitted, “but I’d try to get the same message across so that people don’t have to kiss up to politicians. No matter what party they’re in, you should evaluate their work and make your judgments accordingly. That’s the way to do it in life and every other subject, but sometimes in America we get gaga, we look at the wrong values.” Then again, the former Mayor of Carmel, CA did make up his speech up on the spot just minutes before taking the stage. It might be hard not to do things differently. “I thought of that five seconds before we started,” he smiled. “You walk there [in front of] an audience of ten thousand people who are extremely enthusiastic and your mind goes blank, anyway. So I’d say something else.” Stay tuned for more on Trouble With The Curve , in theaters September 21. Follow Jen Yamato on Twitter . Follow Movieline on Twitter .
Roger Friedman of Showbiz 411 reports that U.K. mega-singer Adele will sing the title theme song to the next James Bond joint, Skyfall — though, grain of salt: He’s confirming his own scoop here, and the phrase “I think I can confirm for you what I said some months ago” doesn’t inspire total confidence. But it’s Friday, and a girl can dream! And Friedman’s got it right when he argues that “Adele’s sound is the quintessential James Bond sound.” Also, those other recent 007 themes did roundly suck. Bring on Agent Adele! [ Showbiz 411 ]
Digging into the rabbit hole of a mystery that is the inflammatory, anti-Muslim film Innocence of Muslims — the amateurish viral trailer for which set off protests and violent attacks in at U.S. embassies in Libya, Egypt, and other cities this week — Vice Magazine and Gawker have fingered the man they believe directed the project last year in California. Did industry veteran Alan Roberts (AKA Robert Brownell), a B-movie director and editor behind cult/softcore Cannon/Golan & Globus-era schlock Karate Cop , The Sexpert , and The Happy Hooker Goes Hollywood , make the incendiary anti-Muslim screed? Vice reports that they were “anonymously furnished with documents” pointing to a Robert Brownell AKA Alan Roberts: The documents clearly state that in 2009 and 2011 Robert Brownell purchased pre-production services related to Desert Warrior , which has been widely reported as the working title of the film that the world now knows as Innocence of Muslims. The documents also include Robert Brownell’s address in Tarzana, California (or at least his address when the purchases were made in 2009; the property is now up for sale), phone number, and “contact information,” which lists yet a different name—Alan Roberts. Meanwhile, Gawker confirms Roberts was the director on Innocence of Muslims , filmed under the title Desert Warrior with a different script from the allegedly blasphemous final version. A former business partner and an acquaintance confirmed to the website that Roberts is the same Alan Roberts listed on IMDb as the director of low-budget B-movie threequel The Happy Hooker Goes Hollywood (1980) (co-starring Adam West!), the action pic Karate Cop (1991), and the Harry Hamlin erotic thriller Save Me (1994). Roberts is said to be laying low, understandably. According to Roberts’ ex-business partner, Roberts filmed Desert Warrior without knowledge that it was going to be re-dubbed into its final version: “They redubbed it, they brought in the actors, put in new sounds, changed the names,” said the business partner. “And this was done later, before it was initially released. Of course Alan had nothing to do with it.” If true, it sounds like producer Sam Bacile (or “Sam Bacile,” as his identity is still in question) is more culpable for the incendiary material within Innocence of Muslims than Roberts, a workman director and sometimes editor with ties to the ’70s-’80s Cannon/Vestron/Golan & Globus era of cheap-o schlock cinema. More info as it comes… in the meantime, here’s a look at Roberts’ heretofore best known works. [ Gawker , Vice ]
One of my favorite movies to screen at the Toronto International Film Festival was Seven Psychopaths , which was written and directed by Irish playwright-turned-filmmaker Martin McDonagh . Beginning in the mid-1990s, McDonagh caused quite a stir in New York’s theater world with his funny, macabre plays, The Beauty Queen of Leenane , A Behanding in Spokane and The Pillowman. And in 2008, he turned heads in the film world with his debut feature, In Bruges , which he also wrote and directed. (If you haven’t seen that film, you should before CBS Films releases Seven Psychopaths on Oct. 12. It’s a dark comic gem with genuine emotional depth about two hit men who go on the lam when a job goes wrong. Seven Psychopaths finds McDonagh in Quentin Tarantino territory, and dare I say, the Pulp Fiction director should watch his back. (By the way, the two have never met.) McDonagh has a stylish way with violence — there’s an exploding head scene in the movie that rocked my world — he structures his films to move like sleek sports cars, and his black wit is sharper than QT’s. (Yes, I did just assert that.) Check out the trailer below for a riff on Gandhi’s “an eye for an eye” quote that, thanks to Sam Rockwell’s delivery, makes me laugh every time I hear it. In Seven Psychopaths , Rockwell plays a struggling smart-ass actor who, with his non-violent partner-in-crime (Christopher Walken), does a bit of dog-napping to make ends meet. The fun begins when he makes off with the Shih Tzu of a cold-blooded gangster (Woody Harrelson) and implicates his blocked screenwriter friend (Colin Farrell), who happens to be working on a script identical to the film’s title. (By the way, Farrell, who’s tight with McDonagh, has done some of the best acting in his career in In Bruges and Seven Psychopaths .) I interviewed McDonagh in Toronto, and I’ll be posting the results on Movieline closer to the release date of Seven Psychopaths . In the meantime, there was one morsel from our conversation that I wanted to share now. The film also stars singer/songwriter Tom Waits as a bunny-loving psycho with some Dexter similarities, and when I asked McDonagh what his next project might be, he told me that he and Waits had been working on “a creepy fucked-up musical” that, he said, Waits was calling A Very Dark Matter . He added that their collaboration was in the vein of The Black Rider: The Casting of the Magic Bullets , the creepy-funny stage musical that Waits created with avant garde theater director Robert Wilson and Beat maniac William S. Burroughs. After my interview with McDonagh, I searched through some of Waits fan forums and found reference to the project. According to one , Wilson was involved with the musical, which was supposed to debut in Paris in 2011, and the story was based on Hans Christian Andersen’s 1847 fairy tale The Shadow , in which a man’s shadow gets the better of him. “It kind of fell through,” McDonagh said of his collaboration with Waits. But, he added, “it’s in the back of my mind to do.” I think a musical by these two masters of black comedy is an exciting idea, and I encourage their fans to encourage them to resume collaborating. In the meantime, watch the Seven Psychopaths trailer. Follow Frank DiGiacomo on Twitter. Follow Movieline on Twitter.
Deadline reports that Al Pacino has been tapped to play famed Penn State fixture Joe Paterno, the legendary football coach who enjoyed the winningest reign in history before the Jerry Sandusky sexual abuse scandal marred his legacy. A little side-by-side photo comparison shows that Pacino bears a resemblance to the late coach, if you squint a bit; after a spotty run in film and TV of late (veering from the TV movie You Don’t Know Jack , which earned him an Emmy and Golden Globe, to the Adam Sandler comedy Jack & Jill — let’s not even talk about Dunkaccino ), JoePa’s rise and fall might offer some meaty material for the Oscar-winner. Though the project is still in development — ICM is shopping it around, according to Deadline — Pacino is attached, and a script will be adapted from Joe Posnanski’s New York Times bestselling biography Paterno . [ Deadline ]
