Rooney Mara has been cast as computer hacker Lisbeth Slanader in the English language adaptation of Swedish novelists Stieg Larsson’s best-selling thriller The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo. She’ll appear opposite Daniel Craig in the David Fincher directed film.
Incredibly, Mara beat out several other, better-known actresses for the role including Natalie Portman, Anne Hathaway, Ellen Page, Mia Wasikowska,Scarlett Johansson and Carey Mulligan. Mara doesn’t have much of a resume. Her biggest role so far has been a lead in this years A Nightmare On Elm Street remake. She does, however, have a role in Fincher’s upcoming The Social Network, due out this fall, which possibly gave the director a bit more insight as to what the actress can do.
If you’ve read the book or seen the 2009 Sewdish film adaptation from director Niels Arden Oplev, than you already know why their was fierce competition among actresses for the role. Lisbeth is one of the more complex female characters to come along in quite a while and in the first book/film travels an arc that starts from an exceedingly dark place.
For me, Rooney will have to go a long way to replace the impression that actress Noomi Rapace made on me in the role in the original Swedish film. Of course, a majority of English speaking folks will never see that version, nor the two sequels that adapted Larsson’s other two books – The Girl Who Played With Fire and The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet’s Nest. That’s a shame as her performance was one of the most compelling I’ve seen in any language for quite a while.
Presumably Mara is under contract for possible sequels if the first film does well.
The English language version of The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo begins shooting next month in Sweden for a December 2011 release.
The more I write about Warner Brothers planned Logan’s Run film, the more I am starting to believe producers Joel Silver and Akiva Goldsman insistence that this film will be more an adaption of William F. Nolan and George Clayton Johnson’s original 1967 novel rather than a straight up remake of the 1976 film version. I’ve got not real solid reason for believing what they say, so maybe it’s more of a hope. I read the original book years ago and was struck by the differences between it and it’s cinematic equivalent. I’m not saying it’s better, just different and with plenty of untapped material for a writer to incorporate into new film version.
That’s the assignment 28 Days Later scripter Alex Garland has in front of him. The Hollywood Reporter is stating that the writer is in final negotiations to adapt the book for Warners and director Carl Rinsch. Garland also has Sunshine and The Beach to his credit.
The studio has been developing the remake for several years now, going through a couple of writers and directors already. Will this be the magic combination to get the film in to production?
Producer Joel Silver has stated that his currently in development remake of Logan’s Run is being planned to be shot in 3D.
Less than a week after the announcement that the project had acquired a new director, Carl Erik Rinsch, Silver made his intentions to produce the film in 3D known to MTV’s Movie Blog -
I’d like to make Logan’s Run [in 3-D]. It’s a movie I’ve always been intrigued with, excited by. We’re writing a script now and that should be a big 3-D movie and it should be devised and shot in 3-D. I think if we can pull it together, then it would be.
If Silver and company are going to embrace 3D for this, at least they’re doing the smart thing by planning on doing it from the start. We’ve already seen examples of how wretched a result the process converting a 2D movie to 3D can deliver. I’m looking at you Alice In Wonderland and Clash Of The Titans.In fact, I’d wager that as more product is going in to the production pipeline with the intention of being made in 3D, we’re going to see a gradual fade away of post-production conversion of 3D. This of course just means that the studios are planning their money grab of adding a ridiculous premium onto ticket prices from the beginning rather than trying to do it with any old film they have laying around about to be released.
And while the idea of the film being 3D doesn’t move me one way or another all that much, I am starting to get a bit more interested in seeing what Silver and Rinsch have in store. While the original 1976 film is a classic of science-fiction films, the original 1967 novel on which it was based is a classic in science-fiction literature, and one that the film deviated from at times. I am intrigued to see what elements they keep or delete for this new iteration.
Orlando Bloom is the latest addition to the cast of Paul W. S. Anderson’s The Three Musketeers. But instead of taking a dashing heroic role, the Lord Of The Rings and Pirates Of The Caribbean star will be playing the villainous Duke of Buckingham. Bloom joins Christoph Waltz as Cardinal Richelieu, Logan Lerman as D’Artagnan, Matthew MacFadyen as Athos, Ray Stevenson as Porthos, Luke Evans as Aramis, Milla Jovovich as M’lady De Winter and Mads Mikkelsen as Rochefort.
The Summit Entertainment is set for a 3D release next summer. Warner Brothers is also working on their own adaptation of Alexandre Dumas’s classic (and public domain) adventure novel with director Doug Liman.
Wondering what director Paul Greengrass is going to do now that he has decided to not return for a fourth Bourne film? He seems to be wondering what his next project will be as well.
One film he won’t be doing is the 3D remake of Fantastic Voyage being developed at Twentieth Century Fox by producer James Cameron. Although there has been buzz circulating for a while that Greengrass was close to signing on to the project, Deadline is now reporting that he is passing. Instead, it looks as if Greengrass is circling a new version of Robert Louis Stevenson’s classic novel Treasure Island being developed by Sherlock Holmes producer Lionel Wigram over at the Warner Brothers lot. Reportedly the Greengrass, Wigram and Warners will need to agree on a screenwriter before Greengrass will make his participation official.
In the meantime, Greengrass is getting ready to shoot They Marched Into Sunlight from a script by J. Michael Straczynski for a 2013 release.
Much like Fox’s Planet Of The Apesreboot, Fox has had a remake of Fantastic Voyage, their 1966 science-fiction classic best remembered for Raquel Welch in a white skin diving suit, in development for some time. Roland Emmerich was attached to the project back in 2007. It now looks like producers Cameron and Jon Landau are back to looking for someone else do direct the Shane Salerno script that everyone seems to be enthusiastic about.
Disney is taking another crack at bringing Jules Verne’s classic adventure novel 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea back to the big screen, this time with David Fincher at the helm.
It was last November that the studio scuttled a version of the project that was being developed by director McG with screenwriters Bill Marsilli, Justin Marks and Randall Wallace all taking passes at the script. This was following the replace of studio chairman Dick Cook with Rich Ross. It is not unusual for a new studio boss to axe in-development projects started by the previous regime in favor of their own pet projects. Since reportedly McG’s Captain Nemo: 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea was the furthest from being ready to go into production out of all the in-development projects at the studio, it was the one sent to the chopping block.
But where McG’s take on the property was an origin story for Nautilus skipper Captain Nemo, the Hollywood Reporter is stating that Fincher’s pitch to the studio was “described as being in the vein of Star Wars or The Empire Strikes Back. It will aim to be visually dazzling. ”
Fincher has been itching to tackle 20,000 Leagues for a while. Back at the early part of last year, he was reported to have been circling an adaptation of the book that Sam Raimi was developing for New Line with a script by Craig Titley. As of earlier this year, this version was still being developed by the studio. Since the book is in the public domain, anyone could make their own version, so it should be interesting to see who gets theirs started first. I expect those direct-to-DVD maestros over at Asylum will have one in production just minutes after either of these two projects gets a greenlight.
Carter Beats The Devil, Glen David Gold’s 2001 historical thriller novel about a famous stage magician who gets caught up in the events surrounding the death of President William G. Harding, has been optioned by Warner Brothers.
The news comes from Film School Rejects, who got the word from Gold himself after the site ran a story recently about how the book was prime material for a possible big screen adaptation. As the deal had just been signed this week, there are no additional details as to what, if any, scripters, producers or other production personnel have been attached to the project.
The book fictionalizes the life story of Charles Carter, whom no less than Harry Houdini gave the nickname “Carter The Great.” After he performs for President Harding, even bringing him up on to the stage to assist with a trick for the show’s finale. But when the President is found dead in his hotel room hours later, Carter comes under the scrutiny of a US Secret Service Agent. As the investigation unfolds, we are treated to flashbacks to Carter’s life, with him encountering historical personages from a pre-film career Marx Brothers to Houdini to BMW founder Max Friz to Philo Farnsworth, the inventor of television.
The book has been optioned before, though nothing concrete ever got moving before the option lapsed. Perhaps Warner can perform the right magic to get it to the screen.
Filmmakers have been trying to figure out how to bring Isaac Asimov’s epic Foundation trilogy to the big scree for three decades with little success. But now Roland Emmerich, the latest helmer to be attached to the project thinks he has the answer.
In an interview with MTV Movie Blogs, the director of Independence Day and 2012 stated that he was going to use the same motion capture-driven computer generated animation that James Cameron used to bring the alien Na’Vi to life in Avatar to life. “It has to be done all CG because I would not know how to shoot this thing in real.”
Having actually read Asimov’s series, which retells the fall of the Roman Empire as the demise of a galaxy-spanning Empire, Emmerich’s quote caught me by surprised. Unlike Avatar, Asimov’s Foundation series takes place in a galaxy where humans are the only sentient life. There are no aliens who may be vaguely humanoid but need to be realized through computer animation, so I am perplexed as why he feels the need to go this way. Surely he could shoot live actors in front of green screens and then add Trantor, Terminus and the other fantastic worlds of Asimov’s series in during post-production?
Emmerich is expecting to receive the latest draft of the script from screenwriter Robert Rodat today. Rodat, who scripted Saving Private Ryan for Steven Spielberg and the upcoming Warcraft for Sam Raimi, worked with Emmerich previously on 2000′s The Patriot. The film has not been given a greenlight yet from the studio.
Let’s face it. The movies are usually pretty bad at predicting the future. If they weren’t we all be deciding whether to take the flying car or the jet pack to work every morning. And Peter Hyams’ 2010 (1984), an adaptation of Arthur C. Clarke’s 2010: Odyssey Two, itself a sequel to the novel and film collaboration between Clarke and director Stanley Kubrick that was 2001: A Space Odyssey, definitely botches several of its prognostications- we don’t have moon bases, commercial space stations and Pan Am has been out of business since 1991. Of course, its biggest gaffe is the Cold War tensions that existed between the United States and the Soviet Union at the time would extend 26 years further when they barely lasted into the next decade. (Although the Cold War subplot was more an invention of the movie rather than the book, Clarke would make a similar mistake when his next book in the series 2061: Odyssey Three, published in 1987, would postulate apartheid lasting in South Africa until the mid-2030s, when it in fact was done away with in 1994.) Despite these flaws, I think that the film’s message of learning to live in peace and turning our attentions to exploring the wonders of the universe is as timely as ever.
The film also works as a pretty good science-fiction thriller as the combined crew of Soviet and American astronauts try to piece together what happened to the spaceship Discovery out in orbit around Jupiter and what part did the mysterious, two kilometer long black Monolith play in it?
And Bowman’s last words before he disappeared – “My god, it’s full of stars!” – may not exactly apply to the cast’s marquee value at the time, but there some is some nice talent on display here. You have Roy Scheider as the lead American astronaut, with John Lithgow and Bob Balaban as his fellow countrymen, while Helen Mirren does a believable Russian accent as the head of the Soviet crew. And look for author Clarke in not one but two cameos. First, he can be seen feeding pigeons from a park bench in front of the White House (above) and then later he is on the cover of Time magazine (below) as the Soviet Premier for a story about the growing political tensions. That’s 2001 director Kubrick as the United States president as well.
Oddly enough, the 2010 is currently out of print on DVD and the fact that there hasn’t been any noise about a new special editino being in the works makes me think that someone is asleep at the wheel at Warner Home Video. If you don’t have a cop, below is the short promotional film made at the time of 2010′s production, taking a peek at the whole process. I think the most interesting thing is the early form of email that Hyams and Clarke used to collaborate while being on opposite sides of the world from each other. Many of these emails from the films pre-production phase were published in book form as The Odyssey File: The Making Of 2010 at the time of the film’s release.
Our first look at the first part of the two-film finale of the Harry Potter series, Harry Potter And The Deathly Hallows, Part 1 comes to us courtesy of USA Today. At first glance, it appears to be nothing more than a standard hero shot of Harry (Daniel Radcliffe), Ron (Rupert Grint) and Hermione (Emma Watson)Looking perhaps a tad disheveled. But the interview with director David Yates indicates that the two films will sport a slightly different look, one which organically grows out of the films’ story.
It’s going to feel very real. We’re going for a vérité approach. Being away from Hogwarts, they’re like these three refugees on the run. They’re out in the big bad world, facing real danger, unguarded by those wonderful benign wizards at Hogwarts. They don’t have a home to go to. We’re kind of pulling away from the magic a bit and bringing more reality to it.
That sounds intriguing.And it is nice to see that the creative team will to experiment so late in the game when I suppose that the natural inclination would be to play things safe. It certainly is a switch from how the too-reverential treatment the material received when the series first kicked off back in 2001.
Harry Potter And The Deathly Hallows Part 1 hits theaters next November, with Part 2 coming out in 2011.
Rooney Mara has been cast as computer hacker Lisbeth Slanader in the English language adaptation of Swedish novelists Stieg Larsson’s best-selling thriller The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo. She’ll appear opposite Daniel Craig in the David Fincher directed film.
