1.) Ron Howard has been taking a break from Rush to work on a documentary with Jay-Z. The film will follow the rapper/producer as he curates the inaugural “Made in America” music festival. The two-day event takes place September 1-2 in Philidelphia and features 20 acts, including Pearl Jam, Run-DMC and Jay-Z himself. Producer Brian Grazer says the film is “going to be born through Jay-Z’s perspective.” This could be a really interesting spin on the traditional concert documentary if done right and given enough depth. As someone who attends festivals like Lollapalooza every year, I’ve always had a lot of curiosities about the ins and outs of these events. [New York Post]
2.) Originally a Darren Aronofsky vehicle before he moved his focus to Noah, The Tiger will now mark the Hollywood feature debut of Bullhead director Michael R. Roskam. Aronofsky will stick around to produce alongside Brad Pitt, while Guillermo Arriaga (Babel, Amores Perros) is handling the screenplay. The John Vaillant book follows a team of men hunting a man-eating tiger in Siberia. The excellent Bullhead is streaming on Netflix, so get on that if you haven’t already done so. [Deadline]
Roskam also recently worked with Michael Mann and “Breaking Bad” executive producer Mark Johnson to sell a pilot script to HBO for “Buda Bridge,” a crime story set in a near-future Brussels. Roskam will direct the pilot.
3.) Edward Zwick (The Last Samurai, Blood Diamond) will direct Tobey Maguire in Pawn Sacrifice, a biopic on chess prodigy Bobby Fischer. Steven Knight (Eastern Promises) is handling the script. David Fincher once planned to make the film before he turned his attention to The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. [Variety]
4.) Zoe Saldana will portray legendary singer Nina Simone in the long-gestating biopic Nina. Cynthia Mort wrote the script and will make her directorial debut on the project, which also has David Oyelowo attached to play Simone’s manager, Clifton Henderson. The film has suffered a series of delays, as original star Mary J. Blige came and went, but it now appears on track to start production on October 16. [THR]
5.) We’ll end today on a couple of The Dark Knight Rises-related stories. First, Joseph Gordon-Levitt recently spoke about the future (or probably end) of the franchise with both THR and on “Jimmy Kimmel Live.” He told the late night talk show host:
I don’t think [the ending of The Dark Knight Rises] is necessarily a set-up. I think it is the great ending for that trilogy. Even if you go back to Batman Begins, he’s talking about how Batman is more than a man, it’s a symbol, and a hero can be anybody and we all have heroes inside of us.
Meanwhile, David Cronenberg revealed in an interview with NextMovie that he isn’t exactly a fan of The Dark Knight Rises or the superhero genre in general:
I don’t think they are making them an elevated art form. I think it’s still Batman running around in a stupid cape. I just don’t think it’s elevated. Christopher Nolan’s best movie is Memento, and that is an interesting movie. I don’t think his Batman movies are half as interesting though they’re 20 million times the expense. What he is doing is some very interesting technical stuff, which, you know, he’s shooting IMAX and in 3-D. That’s really tricky and difficult to do. I read about it in “American Cinematography Magazine,” and technically, that’s all very interesting. The movie, to me, they’re mostly boring.
Some of that makes me think he either hasn’t seen The Dark Knight Rises or if he just has some sort of enhanced vision that allows him to see every movie in three dimensions. Either way, there was once a time when people would have argued that horror movies are just a juvenile blend of boobs and cheap scares. Hell, most still are. But directors like Cronenberg helped elevate the genre to some level of artistic credibility. Unfortunately, he doesn’t see that same potential with comic book movies, mostly because of the limitations placed on filmmakers by today’s studio system:
Absolutely. Anybody who works in the studio system has got 20 studio people sitting on his head at every moment, and they have no respect, and there’s no… it doesn’t matter how successful you’ve been. And obviously Nolan has been very successful. He’s got a lot of power, relatively speaking. But he doesn’t really have power.
I’m thinking Joe Carnahan would probably does.
