As a follow-up to our story yesterday about Justin Timberlake being cast by the Coen’s as the lead in their new film, Inside Llewyn Davis, more casting news of note regarding five films set for production in the new year.
- First up, James Gandolfini is in talks to join Steve Carell and Jim Carrey in Burt Wonderstone, the story of a famous but jaded Vegas magician (the title character to be played by Carrell) who fights for relevance when a new, “hip” street magician (Carrey) appears on the scene. Olivia Wilde will play Carell’s love interest, and Steve Buscemi has signed to play Wonderstone’s friend and partner. 30 Rock’s Don Scardino will direct from a script rewritten by Jason Reitman. Burt Wonderstone is scheduled to start shooting in January.
- Mads Mikkelson, who starred as the bad guy in Daniel Craig’s Casino Royale, has been set to star in The Hunt, which is about to start shooting in Denmark with director Thomas Vintenberg (The Celebration), a co-founder of the Dogme 95 movement with Lars von Trier. Co-written by Vintenberg and Tobias Lindholm (Submarino), the script follows Mikkelson as a recently divorced small town man accused of abusing a small child.
- Up in The Air’s Anna Kendrick has been cast in Pitch Perfect, a musical romantic comedy. Kendrick will play Beca, a rebellious and goth-like college student who discovers her voice in her school’s female a cappella group. Shooting will commence later this month.
- In somewhat more serious casting news, Tom Hooper’s The King’s Speech follow up, Les Misérables (which hasn’t been done on film since Bille August’s 1998 version with Liam Neeson and Claire Danes), just added Eddie Redmayne (My Week With Marilyn, The Good Shepherd) to its all star cast. Playing Marius, he will join Hugh Jackman (Jean Valjean), Russell Crowe (Inspector Javert) and Anna Hathaway (Fantine). The musical has its heart set on Oscar 2013, with a December 2012 release date (after all, The King’s Speech dominated the 2011 Oscars). This edition of the Victor Hugo classic was written by William Nicholson, with Claude-Michel Schonberg and Lain Boublil doing the music. Working Title’s Tim Bevan, and partners, will produce.
- Amanda Seyfried, currently in theatres starring in Andrew Niccol’s In Time, has been cast as Linda Lovelace in Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman’s (Howl) movie about the controversial 70s porn star. Peter Sarsgaard is reportedly in negotiations to play her husband Chuck Traynor, the pornographer who coaxed her into becoming an adult film actress. Reports indicate that the film’s screenwriters, Andy Belling and W. Merritt Johnson, based their screenplay on Eric Danville’s book The Complete Linda Lovelace. A career killer for Seyfried, or a ‘breakout’ role? Time will tell. Filming on Lovelace is expected to start in January.
- Colin Farrell and Dragon Tattoo’s Noomi Rapace have been cast in Dead Man Down, a mob drama to be directed by Niels Arden Oplev, who helmed the original The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, which starred Rapace. The shoot is scheduled for an early 2012 start.
- Mads Mikkelson, who starred as the bad guy in Daniel Craig’s Casino Royale, has been set to star in The Hunt, which is about to start shooting in Denmark with director Thomas Vintenberg (The Celebration), a co-founder of the Dogme 95 movement with Lars von Trier. Co-written by Vintenberg and Tobias Lindholm (Submarino), the script follows Mikkelson as a recently divorced small town man accused of abusing a small child.
When growing up on the eastside of Vancouver back in the 50s and 60s, with two working-class parents who earned somewhere in the neighbourhood of 35¢ an hour and who, most nights, were not home when we arrived back from school, we took refuge many evenings a week at the cinema, or at the central library, then on Burrard at Robson. We read voraciously, consuming pop culture and newsmagazines. We read about film, of course, because from a young age we loved film. We had an Aunt Freda, a vegetarian (even back in the 50s and 60s) who would often take us to the cinema to watch the latest foreign film (we remember Aunt Freda taking us to Never on Sunday [YouTube] — a pretty risqué film for a 10-year-old, even if Melina Mercouri did win the 1960 Best Actress award at Cannes that year — where we developed a lifelong taste for foreign cinema.
In 1965, we began reading about a new director, a survivor of WWII who had moved from his native Poland to France. Soon after his arrival, he met a young Catherine Deneuve, then about 20. Roman Polanski had written a screenplay for a film he intended to title Repulsion. Shortly after Polanski began an affair with Deneuve, he cast her in the lead role of his first English-language film, as a young beauty who finds herself besieged on all sides by the demons of her past, one of the most terrifying ‘horror films’ ever committed to celluloid. VanRamblings finally was afforded the opportunity to see Repulsion — even though we were underage, we were desperate to get in — in autumn 1965, at a screening held as part of Don Barnes’ Varsity Film Festival. We’ve never been quite the same since.
