Public Enemies - What Did You Think?
Frank Darabont has wanted to film Ray Bradbury’s novel Fahrenheit 451 for quite a long time. He’s talked about it a lot more recently as the project he wants to do next. Now he tells SciFiWire that it’s basically at the make or break point, and it all comes down to one thing: casting. Read More »
Jamie Foxx Joins Frank Darabont’s Law Abiding Citizen
Posted on Thursday, October 9th, 2008 by Peter Sciretta
Jamie Foxx is in final talks to join Frank Darabont’s Law Abiding Citizen, a psychological thriller about a criminal mastermind/victim of the legal system who controls a city from the confines of his prison cell. As a result of a plea bargain, one of his wife and daughter’s murderers will be set free, and he is now out to unleash revenge on the killers. Gerard Butler plays the successful assistant D.A. who stands in his way.
Darabont collaborated with Equilibrium scribe Kurt Wimmer on the script. Darabont has been nominated for for three Academy Awards for his Stephen King adaptations The Green Mile and The Shawshank Redemption. His 2007 adaptation of The mist was not as well received. I’m guessing that Citizen won’t require horribly rendered computer generated creature effects, although I could be wrong. The plot synopsis for the project has changed twice, and I’m not even sure if the current version I’ve printed above is accurate.
source: THR
Remembering Stan Winston: Cameron, McG, Favreau, Wright, Darabont
Posted on Tuesday, June 17th, 2008 by Peter Sciretta
The passing of Stan Winston hit everyone off guard yesterday, including the many people who have worked with the legend over the years.
McG has posted a statement on the Terminator Salvation: The Future Begins website, declaring his intention to dedicate the fourth Terminator film to the memory of Stan. Here is an excerpt: “Stan was a good guy who was in it for all the right reasons. He loved what he did. Stan confided in me once, that he created imaginary monsters as a child to keep him company. He said he felt like the only kid in the world who did this. Little did he know his childhood friends would come to be the heroes of millions. You are not alone Stan, the fruit of your imagination will be with us forever.”
Hot Fuzz and Shaun of the Dead director Edgar Wright blogged: “A real genius. And a sad loss.”
Meanwhile, AICN has done an awesome job of gathering statements from some of the filmmakers who have worked with him over the years. Here are some highlights.
James Cameron: “We’ve lost a great artist, a man who made a contribution to the cinema of the fantastic that will resound for a long long time. I don’t need to list the indelible characters he and his team of artists brought to the screen. Readers of your site know them. We all know Stan’s work, the genius of his designs. But not even the fans necessarily know how great he was as a man. I mean a real man — a man who knows that even though your artistic passion can rule your life, you still make time for your family and your friends. He was a good father, and he raised two great kids. His wife of 37 years, Karen, was with him in the beginning, helping him make plaster molds in their garage for low budget gigs on TV movies, and she was with him at the end.”
Jon Favreau: “He was a giant. I was blessed to have known him. I worked with him on both Zathura and Iron Man. He was experienced and helped guide me while never losing his childlike enthusiasm. He was the king of integrating practical effects with CGI, never losing his relevance in an ever changing industry. I am proud to have worked with him and we were looking forward to future collaborations. I knew that he was struggling, but I had no idea that he would be gone so soon. Hollywood has lost a shining star.”
Frank Darabont: “One of the blessings of being in movies is when you meet icons whose work you deeply admire and they turn out to be fantastic people. They’re the ones you’re honored to encounter along the way, the people who are kind and gracious and inspiring in addition to being superbly talented. They exhibit genuine humanity and touch your heart in various ways, and you foolishly figure they’ll always be around to get to know better as the years go on. But then they are taken far too soon, and you’re left with the deep and lasting regret of not having gotten to know them nearly as well as you’d wanted or expected to. I’ve met and lost a number of extraordinary people who fall into this category, among them Roddy McDowell, John Frankenheimer, Sidney Pollack, Dave Stevens, and John Alvin. Stan Winston now sadly joins my list.”
Read the full letters, including more from Joe Dante, Rick Baker, Monster Squad director Fred Dekker and others on AICN.
Cannes Posters: Bad Lieutenant, Law Abiding Citizen, Slumdog Millionaire
Posted on Monday, May 19th, 2008 by Peter Sciretta
MTV has a batch of new movie posters from Cannes. The three most interesting can be seen above:
- Werner Herzog’s (Grizzly Man) remake of Bad Lieutenant starring Nicolas Cage.
- Frank Darabont’s (The Shawshank Redemption, The Green Mile) Law Abiding Citizen which stars Gerard Butler as an assistant D.A. is targeted by a victim of the legal system who looks to exact a certain revenge.
- Danny Boyle’s (Trainspotting, 28 Days Later…) Slumdog Millionaire, a comedy about an illiterate kid who looks to become a contestant on the Hindi version of Who Wants to be A Millionaire in order to re-establish contact with the girl he loves, who is a huge fan of the show.
Slumdog Millionaire has completed filming, while the other two films are in preproduction. Check out more movie posters from Cannes on MTV.
Tom Hanks Drops Out of Frank Darabont’s Fahrenheit 451
Posted on Friday, March 28th, 2008 by Hunter Stephenson
“Sayonara, Bonfire of the Vanities!”
Frank Darabont’s adaptation of the classic novel Fahrenheit 451 ranks right up there with Tarantino’s Inglorious Bastards, Fincher’s Rendezvous with Rama and Aronofsky’s take on Lone Wolf & Cub as an epic dream project that’s been discussed for ages. For nearly a year, Tom Hanks had been pegged for the 2009 film’s lead role of Guy Montag, a content fireman of the future who slowly realizes that his government occupation of burning books and oppressing book owners is nothing less than horrific.
Unfortch(-unately, by reader request) Hanks is no longer attached to what would have been his second collabo(-ration, by reader request) with the director after 1999’s so-so The Green Mile, according to Darabont…
“Mr. Hanks sadly and regretfully had to back out,” Darabont told MTV. “I was really looking forward to working with him again but his other commitments just precluded it. He had to take a step back.”
Darabont remains confident in his long percolating vision, and it sounds like the film won’t be sidetracked by the snag. But what actor is up to the challenge of portraying sci-fi author legend Ray Bradbury’s disillusioned everyman in one of the great, prolific Man vs. The Man tales of all time?
“It needs to be somebody like [Hanks] who has the ability to trigger a greenlight but is also the right guy for the part. It’s a narrow target. It’s a short list of people,” Darabont sighed.
As a fan of the book who was never big on Francois Truffaut’s 1966 version, which always seemed more occupied with getting film students’ rocks off than being a worthy harbinger of doom, this quote from Darabont is particularly cool…
“I see this movie so clearly in my head. It’s flowing in my veins,” he said. And just because you think of books first when you think “Fahrenheit 451,” don’t expect something akin to Jane Austen, Darabont promised. He explained, “One character in the script says, ‘It’s not really even about books. It’s about control.’ It’s about the control of government and authority. It’s one of the greatest books ever written. It’s got all that great political stuff underneath the skin of it but really what it is is a great galloping tale.”
I haven’t yet seen The Mist, but Darabont seems to be getting a little angrier and darker with age and that’s always a good thing in my book. The exception being Craig Ferguson, who agreeably treats life like a beach as his hair goes grayer.
Discuss: Who should play Montag now that Hanks has lost his bookmark? Should Darabont go younger?
Frank Darabont Plans For Tokyo Rose after Fahrenheit 451
Posted on Wednesday, January 2nd, 2008 by Peter Sciretta
One of Frank Darabont’s upcoming projects is Tokyo Rose, the Iva Toguri D’Aquino biopic. Our friends at Collider talked to screenwriter Christopher Hampton who offered a few new details.
“[It's] based on the story of Tokyo Rose, who was a Japanese American woman who was arrested in Tokyo right after the War, brought back to San Francisco, put on trial for radio propaganda and sentenced to eight years imprisonment and she was completely innocent. It was all a witch hunt. She was absolutely innocent and eventually, in the 70’s, she was given a Presidential Pardon by President Ford.”
“I started off with a two hundred and something page screenplay because there was so much material and her trial happened to be the longest and most expensive in American legal history at the time, in the late 40’s. There were 54 volumes of trail transcripts, six thousand pages. So it’s all been going slowly…” Hampton said. “The contours of the story are beginning to emerge and I’m starting to know what I can throw away and what I have to keep and what I don’t need. But that’s with a biographical project. “
Hamtpon confirms that Darabont plans to shoot the project after Fahrenheit 451 (”Fahrenheit is his passion project that he’s had waiting to go for years and years and years. So he’s very excited about that. But we’ll see as you can never predict what will happen.”
Frank Darabont to Fight For Indy 4 Writing Credit
Posted on Tuesday, November 13th, 2007 by Peter Sciretta
Frank Darabont has never been quiet about his horrible experience “wasting a year” writing Indiana Jones 4. Lucas ditched Darabont’s script and hired Spider-Man scribe David Koepp to pen Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skulls. However, everyone I’ve talked to close to the project has told me that Darabont and Koepp’s screenplays are very similar. I haven’t read either script, so I really can’t comment. But even Darabont expects a fight with the studio over writing credits on the fourth Indiana Jones adventure.
“I haven’t read the script, [but] at a certain point I will because I’m sure there will be an arbitration over writing credits,” Darabont revealed to MTV. “I keep hearing from people who are near the production and they keep saying, ‘You know, they’re using more of your ideas here than you may have thought.’”
“I did suggest to Steven that he cast John Hurt in this movie and I’m delighted that Mr. Hurt is a part of it. It’s not entirely the role I suggested him for … but I did suggest him.”
Darabont admits that he had nothing to do with the character that Shia LaBeouf plays in Crystal Skull: “”That’s a whole new element that’s been brought in. Shia? I don’t remember writing that character.”
Guillermo del Toro tells IESB that he would love to do a new Frankenstein film. Del toro apparently is interested in doing a revamp of the classic Universal Monster, possibly even using some ideas from Frank Darabont’s early 90’s script.
Sure, there is no deal on the table right now, and del Toro’s immediate future plate is looking kind of full, but I’m sure if the opportunity came up, Guillermo would make it work. If Pan’s Labyrinth is any indication of what he could do with a dark period fantasy tale, than a new Frankenstein could be great. Is anyone at Universal reading this? Get going on this one pronto!
Dimension Films has released a second movie trailer for Frank Darabont’s big screen adaptation of Stephen King’s The Mist. One of our readers saw a test screening of the film last week. Here is what Sean said about the film:
“It was pretty good, not as good as you would think. The story left a lot of loose ends and the plot was predictable. Now , I didn’t see the finished product, but it was damn near done. the director was there and he said was 98% complete. Some of the CGI needs to be finished and the music refined. Overall it was a good movie, but not as good as I had hoped.”
Another one of my friends also just saw the film at ShowEast, and also reiterated that the movie was pretty good. Although, everyone seems to agree that the special effects still need a lot of work. Even the big giant bug things in the trailer look kinda lame. I’m also still not convinced that Darabont’s experiment with Shield-like documentary style cinematography was the best way to shoot this thing (I’m personally a fan of how Darabont shot the other King adaptations).
Check out the new trailer after the jump.
At Comic-Con 2007, Frank Darabont premiered footage from his upcoming adaptation of Stephen King’s The Mist, and everyone (including myself) was not impressed. Stephen King adaptations are tough. They can either be really good, or really bad (heck, with The Shining, they made one of each).
Darabont definitely knows how to do it right. Find me one person who hated The Shawshank Redemption or The Green Mile. Even my old man loved both of those flicks, and he’s a tough audience. But one of the things I’ve loved about all of Darabont’s films thus far was the amazing cinematography. It seems like he’s chosen to forgo the extensive set-ups to shoot most of The Mist with steadicam, utilizing both techniques and the crew of The Shield (if I remember correctly). But is this an experiment or a movie?
The new trailer is pretty impressive/intense (with exception of some of the computer generated effects) and features Clint Mansell’s awesome score from The Fountain soundtrack. Check it out after the jump, and share your thoughts.
Frank Darabont says Indiana Jones 4 was a Tremendous Disappointment
Posted on Tuesday, April 17th, 2007 by Peter Sciretta
Frank Darabont has written (and directed) some of the best movies of all time: The Shawshank Redemption and The Green Mile. He’s currently in post production on his latest Stephen King adaptation The Mist. The writer has started to speak out about the disasterious experience that was Indiana Jones 4. His comments are sure to anger Star Wars director George Lucas. Darabont, who also worked on The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles, says that his time working on Indiana Jones 4 “topped the list” of his worst writing experiences of all time.
“It was a tremendous disappointment and a waste of a year,” Darabont told MTV. “It showed me how badly things can go. I spent a year of very determined effort on something I was very excited about, working very closely with Steven Spielberg and coming up with a result that I and he felt was terrific. He wanted to direct it as his next movie, and then suddenly the whole thing goes down in flames because George Lucas doesn’t like the script.”
Spielberg had acclaimed the screenplay as the best since Raiders of the Lost Ark. Darabont claims he confronted Lucas directly:
“I told him he was crazy. I said, ‘You have a fantastic script. I think you’re insane, George.’ You can say things like that to George, and he doesn’t even blink. He’s one of the most stubborn men I know.”
Remember the prequels? Remember when Lucas said Empire Strikes Back was the WORST Star Wars movie? Lucas’ sensibilities have been really wrong for twenty years. But here is the kicker, Darabont’s screenplay supposedly dealt with Indy investigating UFOs in the 1950s, after the demise of the Nazi regime. [Update: We have been informed that the accuracy of this claim has been debated.] The script also featured Marion Ravenwood (Karen Allen) and Willie Scott (Kate Capshaw) in one scene, and it does not have Jones’ son.
So may-be George Lucas was in the right (for once). Remember, even a broken clock is right twice a day.
