Film Comment News Digest: 7/14/14

All the news that’s fit to be lifted from other sites and semi-rewritten:

While you’re busy waiting to see Olivier Assayas’s Clouds of Sils Maria, the director is about to embark on his first American film. Idol’s Eye, which starts shooting in October in Chicago, stars Robert Pattinson, Robert De Niro, and Rachel Weisz. Let’s turn it over to Assayas: “It’s a true crime story, part of Chicago lore. End of the 1970s, burglars confront the Outfit, specifically mob über-boss Tony Accardo—the kind of guys you see in Michael Mann’s Thief, which was inspired by similar characters. I wrote the screenplay based on a Playboy piece by Hillel Levin (“Boosting the Big Tuna”) who also did all the historical research I needed to establish the facts. The interesting part of it is that in the process we discovered Hillel had initially gotten many of the facts wrong, and he ended up completely reconsidering his own reading of the story. I’m bringing my own crew, and the DP is Yorick Le Saux. The title comes from the name of a famous (real) diamond.” …

Philippe Garrel is set to shoot L’Ombre des femmes (“Women’s Shadow”) next week with Stanislas Merhar, Clotilde Courau, and Lena Paugam in the lead roles. As you might have guessed, it’s another take on love, desire, and the rise and fall of a couple … Journey to the Shore is the title of Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s next project, a road movie adapted from a novel by Kazumi Yumoto. Tadanobu Asano plays a man who returns to his wife (Eri Fukatsu) after disappearing for three years … Israeli video artist Omer Fast takes the Steve McQueen route with his London-set feature debut Remainder. Adapted from a 2005 novel by Tom K. McCarthy, it stars Tom Sturridge as a man who loses his memory after being struck by a falling object and tries to reconstruct his past out of fragmented memories in a series of increasingly extreme actions. Fast describes it as “an elliptical thriller about a person whose past catches up with him when he’s most vulnerable” … Shane Black has teamed up with Russell Crowe and Ryan Gosling for The Nice Guys, in which a pair of private eyes investigates the suicide of a fading porn star in 1970s Los Angeles and uncovers a conspiracy “bizarrely rooted in smog and the U.S. auto industry.” Once again Black’s old patron Joel Silver is producing. Let’s hope they can recapture the magic of Lethal Weapon and The Last Boy Scout. I’m being serious … Now that his film about Austrian basements is wrapped, Ulrich Seidl is turning to a historical project set in the 18th century about a real-life Robin Hood figure from northern Austria, although Seidl says “naturally, as it’s a film, we will take all necessary artistic liberties.” He adds: “We had to deal with monarchy, meaning a very repressive state: a state as criminal as criminals themselves. A bit like today.” …

It looks like Andrew Bujalski’s ship has finally come in with his next film. Now shooting as you read this, Results is about a pair of personal trainers who land a new client who’s recently become extremely wealthy. Cast includes Guy Pearce, Cobie Smulders, Kevin Corrigan, Giovanni Ribisi… and Anthony Michael Hall … Takashi Miike is hard at work on Yakuza Apocalypse: The Great War of the Underworld, but after that he may make his U.S. debut with The Outsider, an epic story set in post–World War II Japan, chronicling the life of a former American G.I. who joins the yakuza, and slated to star the ready-for-anything Tom Hardy. Meanwhile, Hardy is going to play Elton John in a planned biopic called Rocketman, will play Mad Max in Mad Max: Fury Road, and is currently in the middle of playing the notorious Sixties English identical-twin gangsters Reggie and Ronald Kray in Legend. Does this mean he gets paid double his usual salary? A promising supporting cast includes Christopher Eccleston, Emily Browning, and David Thewlis. On the plus side, it’s a Working Title production; on the minus, it’s directed by Brian Helgeland, who has yet to make a halfway decent film …

Last time we checked, Jean-François Richet was planning a remake of Blame It on Rio. Then we learned he’s also planning Pox Americana, a Western set in New Mexico, about an Army officer and an Indian scout in the 1850s on a mission to assassinate the head of the Navajo nation. Now we hear that, following the success of their 2005 Assault on Precinct 13 remake, Why Not Productions and Richet have wrapped shooting on Blood Father, an adaptation of a 2005 novel by Peter Craig, screenwriter of The Town. Now in postproduction, it stars, uh, Mel Gibson as an ex-con trying to protect his estranged daughter (Erin Moriarty) from drug dealers (in New Mexico again) and co-stars William H. Macy, Diego Luna, and Michael Parks … Ewan McGregor and Mandy Patinkin will star in Phillip Noyce’s adaptation of Philip Roth’s 1997 novel American Pastoral in which a Jewish-American businessman’s world is upended when Vietnam War activist daughter carries out a terrorist act … Meryl Streep will play opera diva Maria Callas in a new HBO movie …

Coen Brothers update: we reported that their new film Hail Cesar, would feature George Clooney as a silent film star acting in an epic set in ancient Rome. We lied! Seems that was an elaborate hoax to throw newshounds off the scent. In fact it’s about a fixer (played by Clooney) in 1950s Hollywood who covers up scandals and keeps the studios’ stars in line, and it also features Josh Brolin, Scarlett Johansson, Jonah Hill, Channing Tatum, Tilda Swinton, and Ralph Fiennes. Meanwhile, the duo are rewriting Steven Spielberg’s untitled Cold War thriller in which Tom Hanks will play an American attorney enlisted by the CIA to go behind the Iron Curtain to negotiate the release of Gary Francis Powers, the U.S. Air Force pilot captured when his U-2 spy plane was shot down …

While Abel Ferrara is about to unleash Pasolini, his film about the murder of Pier Paolo Pasolini (played by Willem Dafoe), La macchinazione, which likewise probes the mysterious death of Pasolini, whose corpse was found at a seaplane base in Ostia on November 2, 1975, began shooting last week, under the direction of former Pasolini assistant Davide Grieco. The film details the last three months of the life of the director (played here by Massimo Ranieri), when he was completing Salò, writing Petrolio (an exposé about political corruption at the highest level), and becoming involved with Pino Pelosi. When the negative of Salò was stolen, Pasolini went to the seaplane base to recover it, and walked into a trap. Pelosi was a pawn of the Magliana Gang, a criminal organization based in his home village, who were acting on orders from political puppet-masters. Per Grieco, “Pasolini was killed by Pelosi, who first acted as informant on the theft of the Salò film rolls and then served as bait for the ambush. He was killed because he was investigating the shady dealings of Eugenio Cefis, director of [Italy's largest gas and oil company] ENI and [the agri-chemical conglomerate] Montedison.” …

James Franco’s 16th (count ’em!) film as director (or co-director) will be The Disaster Artist, about the making of the 2003 cult film The Room, regarded as the “worst movie ever made.” Franco will co-star with his brother Dave. Ryan Moody’s script is based on Greg Sestero and Tom Bissell’s book The Disaster Artist: My Life Inside the Room. Meanwhile, just when will Franco’s Black Dog, Red Dog see the light of day? A follow-up to the actor-director-etc.’s 2012 Tar, in which NYU graduate students made shorts based on the poetry of C.K. Williams, Black Dog likewise is comprised of shorts adapted from a collection of poems by Stephen Dobyns, and directed by 10 individual students. This one features a dream-team cast: Olivia Wilde, Chloë Sevigny, Whoopi Goldberg, Tim Blake Nelson, Dan Hedaya, and, of course, producer Franco … Australian actor/filmmaker Kieran Darcy-Smith, part of the esteemed Blue Tongue gang (Animal Kingdom, Felony, The Rover) and director of Wish You Were Here, is set to make Blackwater, about the rise of the eponymous military contractor whose services to the U.S. military in Iraq and Afghanistan became a source of controversy and legal proceedings …

You’ll be happy to hear that Richard Linklater is keeping busy. He’s now making Larry’s Kidney, based on Daniel Asa Rose’s 2009 book Larry’s Kidney: Being the True Story of How I Found Myself in China with My Black Sheep Cousin and His Mail-Order Bride, Skirting the Law to Get Him a Transplant—and Save His Life. Add Will Ferrell and Zach Galifianakis and it sort of speaks for itself. UPDATE: We've just learned through indieWire that per Linklater, “the financing kind of went away.” Can anybody get a film made these days? Thankfully Linklater is also at work with animators Femke Wolting and Tommy Pallotta on a remake of the 1964 The Incredible Mr. Limpet, in which Don Knotts played a talking fish. Which means he’s not making Robert Redford’s passion project, an adaptation of Bill Bryson’s 1998 book about two men (to be played by Redford and Nick Nolte) who walk the entire Appalachian Trail. 
Instead, Ordinary Bob has upgraded to helmer Ken Kwapis, he of The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants and Sesame Street: Follow That Bird. Redford and Nolte play the hiking duo, and Emma Thompson and Mary Steenburgen are also in the cast, but this may be one of the few new films in the pipeline not starring Tom Hardy.