Spielberg to Shoot Lincoln after TinTin
Someone took a look at Steven Spielberg’s day planner and spilled the details about the legendary director’s upcoming film schedule. Apparently Spielberg is eyeing a September 2008 start for Tintin, the big screen performance-capture adaptation of the popular Belgian comic-strip hero (and his faithful dog Snowy).
After which he will immediately begin work on the long-gestating Abraham Lincoln biopic Lincoln in early 2009. Spielberg is rushing the project into production so that “it can also open in the same year as Lincoln’s 200th anniversary which comes round then.” Spielberg also tells FOCUS magazine that the production of Tintin would not be threatened by the possible upcoming actor’s strike.
“That doesn’t affect us as it is an animation film with motion capture technology,” he said.
It’s interesting how that works. I’m wondering if SAG may change their rules on this type of production in the future. This also confirms previous reports that Spielberg has but Chicago Seven on the back-burner so that the screenplay can be worked on further. I’m still getting the impression that Chicago Seven might be one of those projects which could easily fall into development heck. Spielberg gets offered all sorts of new interesting opportunities each day, and it would be easy for this project to be passed by.
source: Screendaily
photo credit: Brad Trent
Eli Roth’s Big Budget PG-13 Sci-Fi Mass-Destruction Movie
Hostel/Cabin Fever writer/director Eli Roth is two weeks away from finishing a script for a science-fiction action film inspired by Cloverfield and Transformers.
“This will be my first big-budget, PG-13, mass-destruction movie,” Roth revealed. “I went total chaos and pandemonium. I feel like I pushed the violence in R movies about as far as I can push it. I feel like I’m bled out. I wanna switch it up. Everyone I know has been saying ‘When are you gonna do a movie my kids can see?’ And finally, I’m gonna make a movie that 13-year-old kids can see.”
No plot details have been revealed but Roth plans to make a big announcement next month. It appears that Roth is writing this new project completely on spec, as he says he will be shopping the project to all “the big guns.”
So what will become of Trailer Trash, the project that spun off from Roth’s experiences filming the faux movie trailer Thanksgiving for Grindhouse. The R-Rated “totally silly and absurd” comedy would feature a string of fake movie trailers that would somehow have a narrative through-line. The Mike Fleiss-produced project was set up at Raw Nerve, with an original August 22nd 2008 release date announced by MGM. As far as I can tell, the film has yet to begin principal photography. Roth was also attached to direct an adaptation of the Stephen King novel Cell for Dimension Films. But this adaptation seems to have fallen into development heck.
source: yahoo
Dan Clowes To Write Paul and Michel Gondry’s Animated Movie
Last year Michel Gondry let word leak that he and his 16-year-old son Paul are working on an animated film. Last week got the chance to speak to Gondry in San Francisco, and learned that Dan Clowes, the comic book artist, best known for the film adaptation of Ghost World, is writing the film’s screenplay. Clowes and Michel Gondry have discussed collaborating on a film adaptation of Rudy Rucker’s novel Master of Space and Time, which has been in development heck since 2004. This would be their first collaboration.
“It’s based on [Gondry’s son Paul’s] universe. He’s a sixteen year old. He’s very unique, very funny and very violent in his drawing and his art, showing everything that you could think of that I should have stopped him from coming in contact with, but I failed. He grew up watching Tom & Jerry and Ren and Stimpy, Sponge Bob. If you take all that and mix it with Gangster movies with blood, you get his universe.”
“We’re translating our relationship into a futuristic story with a dictator and a rebel. He’s the dictator in the story and it will be based on his art.”
Gondry also told me that the film is titled Migel Munya (SP? Gondry’s French accent sometimes hakes him difficult to understand). So what is the movie about?
“[The movie is] about a dictator who runs a crazy world where hair is the source of energy. The people there are forced to create art, and if the art is too good they are executed. So the dictator there doesn’t want anyone to be better than him so he kills the inmates who make good art. They try to make rubbish art but sometimes the worse it is for them, the better it is for the dictator.”
Paul Gondry is a published comic book author who splits his time between New York and Paris. In July 2007, Paul made an animated music video for the Southern California garage band the Willowz. Titled “Take a Look Around”, director-file described it “a sometimes-gory tale of war between robotic soldiers and mutants, with a heaping helping of apocalypse and anti-consumerism.” Watch that video.
Shia LaBeouf Wants to Star in Y: The Last Man?
The box office success of Disturbia has made Shia LaBeouf a bankable A-list Hollywood movie star. JoBlo is now reporting that LaBeouf is hoping to be cast in the big screen adaptation of Y: The Last Man. I agree with Shia, Y: The Last Man is the best comic book series published today.
Brian K. Vaughan’s Y: The Last Man. A big screen adaptation has been in the works since early 2006. It’s currently set-up at New Line Cinema.
“I finished the screenplay a few months ago. Everybody at New Line seemed to like it,” Vaughn said at the New York Comic Con. “For Hollywood, it’s either really fast or it’s really slow, and it’s really slow right now. I’ve done my job and it’s out to directors now and it could be totally out of my control after this.”
One would think that if Shia is interested, the project will quickly be elevated from “Development Heck” to a greenlight.
Y: The Last Man follows Yorick Brown, a young amateur escape artist, and his Capuchin monkey, Ampersand, the last two men on Earth. Something (speculated to be a plague) simultaneously kills every mammal possessing a Y chromosome - including embryos, fertilized eggs, and even sperm. Society is plunged into chaos as infrastructures collapse and the surviving women everywhere try to cope with the loss of the men. Yorick goes on a mission to find his girlfriend Beth, who was on vacation in Australia.
The Y: The Last Man series will end (as planned) with a double sized issue #60 in January 2008.