It’s yet another case of competing projects (which the film world seems to adore at the moment), Elite Squad director José Padilha is teaming up with Gran Torino screenwriter Nick Schenk for a drug-themed action movie entitled Tri-Border.
According the THR, the movie is about a DEA agent who is sent to a drug-addled region of Paraguay, as punishment for busting the son of a US Senator. The film follows the various criminal enterprises in the lawless region along the borders of Paraguay, Argentina, and Brazil, as the agent tries to capture a drug overlord so he can return back to the United States.
Is this premise sounds vaguely familiar, it because it’s set in the same region as Triple Frontier, which Kathryn Bigelow is directing from a script by Mark Boal. However, while Triple Frontier was supposed to shoot this year with Tom Hanks attached to star, it’s been put on the back-burner as Boal & Bigelow’s other planned project, about covert ops in Afhanistan, has suddenly became incredibly relevant. Boal was already following the exploits of SEAL Team 6 as the basis for the movie, and the script is now being rewritten to include the death of Osama Bin Laden.
José Padilha is self-financing the development of Tri-Border, and both the director and writer Nick Schenk are currently on a research trip in the area. Here’s what José Padilha had to say about the project, in comparison to his feature debut, Elite Squad, “It’s a different reality, in a totally different environment: the frontier of three countries, in which one finds many different players operating, ranging from Italian, Chinese and Serbian mafias, to Bolivian, Colombian and Brazilian drug dealers, including Lebanese smugglers suspected of helping Hamas and Hezbollah, as well as corrupted police and politicians from Brazil, Paraguay and Argentina.”
It’s not certainly when the movie will shoot, especially as Padilha is currently attached to the remake of Robocop at MGM and is one of the directors being considered for The Wolverine. It’s certainly an interestingsubject though, so hopefully Padilha and/or Bigelow will get to make their films at some point.