Zooey Deschanel Joins David Gordon Green's Your Highness

David Gordon Green , James Franco and Danny McBride are following their stoner action movie Pineapple Express with a stoner medieval comedy called Your Highness, and Zooey Deschanel has just joined the cast. Shooting starts this month in Northern Ireland, according to THR, with Natalie Portman also in the picture.

Ben Best wrote the script, which features "an arrogant, lazy prince (McBride) who must complete a quest to save his father's kingdom." His heroic brother (Franco), or his relatively more heroic brother anyway, joins him, and Deschanel will play his bride. Portman is a warrior princess who is love interest for McBride. Yeah, I love that idea, too.

This isn't the first collaboration between Deschanel, McBride and Green. One of Zooey Deschanel's first big roles (after a string of supporting work) was in David Gordon Green's 2003 All the Real Girls. That film was also Danny McBride's first feature credit, but he and the director go much farther back than that. They were neighbors during their first year of film school, and McBride did second unit directing on Green's excellent feature debut George Washington. And Ben Best, who wrote Your Highness, is part of that family, too. He co-created Eastbound and Down and co-wrote The Foot Fist Way, where he also played Chuck 'The Truck' Wallace. So this is a picture made by a big family...or a big family picture about a lazy stoner prince.

McBride has compared the movie to '80s schlock like The Beastmaster and Krull (he actually said 'Barry Lyndon meets Krull' at one point, which gives me a big grin) and it's been said that it has dragons, wizards, all the good stuff. McBride's character's weapon of choice is the Hoop of Doom, basically a metal hula hoop. The idea is to make an R-rated picture that has some of the same vibe and effects as those '80s fantasy mini-epics.