Following Spanking The Monkey and Flirting With Disaster, David O’Russell was one the big indie ‘it’ directors. However with Three Kings and I Heart Huckabees, he earned a reputations for producing film that underperformed and also for being incredibly difficult to work with. A video of an on set argument with Lily Tomlin became a viral hit and made him a bit of a pariah. Indeed, the combination of these things mean he hasn’t made a movie that’s been released since 2004.
However he’s coming back in a big way, with the Christian Bale and Mark Wahlberg boxing drama The Fighter already in the can, the quirky comedy Nailed recently finished shooting, and he’s also rumoured to be top choice for the adaptation of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. All that has certainly rehabilitated his image in Hollywood, to the point where the man who was previously seen as a bit of an indie enfant terrible is now near the top of a list of directors for an adaptation of the computer game Uncharted.
The LA Times reports that he’s one of the directors currently taking meetings about the movie, although it’s still a long way from a deal being done. The Uncharted videogame follows a descendent of Sir Francis Drake, Nate Drake, a treasure hunter who thinks he has learned the whereabouts of El Dorado, the fabled golden city. As well as having to battle competing treasure seekers, he also has to do battle with mutated descendants of Spaniards and Nazis, who want to stop Nate getting to his goal. As the game was designed to feel like an Indiana Jones style big summer movie, it’s unsuprising Hollywood is itiching to get a film version into cinemas as soon as they can.
However whether David O’Russell is the man to do it is yet to be seen.