In recent years James Woods has disappeared from our movie screens, largely because from 2006-2008 he though he’d give TV a go, with the fun but not very popular Shark, in which he played a devious lawyer turned public prosecutor.
Now that Shark has been cancelled, he’s got to find some new things to do, and while he’ll be appearing in the remake of Straw Dogs next year, it appears he’d also like to turn his hand to directing. He’s previously made a short film called Falling In Love In Pongo Ponga, but now he’s been talking to ComingSoon about his first feature length movie, An American Girl.
Of course, if you’re going to have a movie with a title like that, you need, well, An American Girl to play the main role, and the person he’s lined up is Twilight star, Kristen Stewart. Apparently she’s been involved with the film since before her Twilight days, when Woods approched her with the script for the film, that he’d bought from screenwriters Tim Metcalfe (Kalifornia) and Shaun McCarthy.
However what’s the movie all about? According to Woods, “It’s about a young woman who is really destructive… She’s working in a grocery store and drinking and drugging too much and she’s showing off in front of this guy who likes her, and gets involved in a big sex thing with two guys drunk one night at a quarry. She gets taped doing it on somebody’s phone and in a small town, her reputation is ruined and on a drunken whim, she joins the Marines, which is ridiculous. The ironic thing is that along the way she starts learning these values she doesn’t expect… A tragedy happens and when she comes back to the town where she was a disaster, she rebuilds her life and finds through this tragedy a greater value in herself.”
And just to jump into hyperbole in true Woods style, he adds, “It’s a phenomenal story and a slam-dunk Oscar for her.” Although we think maybe he ought to wait to try and build Oscar buzz until he’s actually made the movie, it could be a good film. Woods is hoping to film the movie next year, once Kristen has finished work on the fourth Twilight movie. It’ll be interesting to see if Woods works as well behind the camera as he does in front of it.