Dream. Team.
Colin Farrell will be reuniting with his “In Bruges” writer-director Martin McDonagh on “Seven Psychopaths.” He plays a screenwriter who runs into a block and ends up getting involved in his friends’ dog-kidnapping scheme. The friends? Sam Rockwell and Christopher Walken, who we’re stunned haven’t worked together onscreen before, though they have logged time with McDonagh’s prose: both thesps were featured in the Broadway run of McDonagh’s most recent play, “A Behanding In Spokane.”
Of course, dog kidnapping plots are bound to go awry, which is where Mickey Rourke comes in, playing a local gangster who, in art imitating life, has lost his precious pooch. You couldn’t have dreamed up a better cast for a filmmaker like McDonagh. While we’ll be getting a bizarre “Iron Man 2” reunion between Rourke and Rockwell, we’re also getting Farrell playing the straight man to a most-exciting combination of quirky Method actors. Even if the movie’s terrible, the behind the scenes DVD material will be brilliant.
HanWay currently owns the rights to the film, as its being shopped to prospective financiers at Cannes, though with that cast, we’ll guess it’s only a matter of time before someone bites. HanWay has a helluva slate at Cannes, with this project added to other promising efforts like David Cronenberg’s “A Dangerous Method” and Steve McQueen’s “Shame.”
It’s good to see McDonagh returning to the film world: in interviews around the time of “In Bruges,” he was non-committal about the prospect of making another film, despite the critical acclaim his feature debut picked up, not to mention winning an Oscar for his short film “Six Shooter.” Perhaps the lukewarm reaction to “A Behanding in Spokane” changed his mind? Either way, we’re excited. There’s no immediate word on when the film will go before cameras, but hopefully we’ll see it in theaters before 2012 is out. [Variety]
