Movie Muser

Ever since Philip Roth’s brilliant American Pastoral won the Pulitzer Prize, there’s been talk of making it into a movie. Everyone from Fisher Stevens to Philip Noyce have been attached to direct at one time or another, but all have dropped out before is went before the camera.

Last year Ewan McGregor, Dakota Fanning and Jennifer Connelly came onboard to star, and now it turns out Ewan won’t just be in front of the camera, he’ll be directing too. It’s certainly a brave more to make for his debut helming debut, as it’s an acclaimed and complex book he’s working from.

Ewan comments in Variety, “It’s a great privilege to be working with Lakeshore on Phillip Roth’s astounding novel American Pastoral. I’ve wanted to direct for years and wanted to wait until I found a story that I ‘had’ to tell and in this script I knew I had found that story.”

American Pastoral is about Swede Levov (McGregor), a legendary high school athlete who grows up to marry a former beauty queen and inherits his father’s business. However his seemingly perfect life is shattered when his daughter (Fanning) rebels by becoming a revolutionary and committing a savage act of political terrorism during the Vietnam War.

The movie will shoot in September in Pittsburgh

There will be a few changes with X-Men: Apocalypse, as while last week it was revealed the movie will feature Colossus, we now know he won’t be played by Daniel Cudmore. Now the person playing Nightcrawler has been revealed, and as the 1980s setting needs a younger actor than the mutant one Alan Cumming played in X-Men 2, this time around Kodi Smit-Mcphee will take the role.

Bryan Singer announced the news via Instagram.

As seen in X2, Nightcrawler has superhuman agility, can teleport, and is endowed with hands and feet that allow him to climb walls. Unlike many mutants he can’t ‘pass’ as a normal human due to his blue skin, elfin appearance and tail. While this resulted in him having some extremely tough times, he has largely been a happy-go-lucky practical joker.

In the comics his parents are Mystique (Jennifer Lawrence) and Azazel, who was played by Jason Flemyng in First Class but is supposed dead in Days Of Future Past. It’s not known how his origins will be changed for Apocalypse – although it’s possible they won’t be, as with Nightcrawler a teenager in the movie, it’s feasible Mystique could have had a secret child some time after the 60s-set First Class. We’ll have to wait and see.

Apocalypse deals with the modern mutants having to deal with one of the most ancient and powerful of their kind, so steps out of the mists of time to cause havoc.

It looks like Scarlett Johansson will be taking a little time off from being a full-on action star so that she can go and look for serial killers, as Deadline reports that she’s set to star in The Psychopath Test. The movie will be based on Jon Ronson’s (The Men Who Stare at Goats) non-fiction book, which looks at how people are diagnosed as psychopaths and how this knowledge is used to deal with murderers.

There’s not too much info on how the book will become a movie, but Kristin Gore (daughter of Al Gore) will write the screenplay, with Jay Roach directing.

Deadline says of the book, that it ‘tackles how the medical community tries to diagnose and classify an elusive group: remorseless, deadly psychopaths. They say one out of every hundred people is a psychopath, devoid of empathy, manipulative, deceitful, charming, seductive, and delusional. The book explores their world and the madness industry.’

Having skipped The Lost Symbol, Ron Howard and Tom Hanks are returning to Robert Langdon with Inferno, following The Da Vinci Code and Angels & Demons. It’s been revealed that it will start shooting in April, and with that the main cast has been revealed in an official press release.

Here’s what they had to say:  ‘Director/producer Ron Howard and producer Brian Grazer have cast an energetic company of some of the world’s most talented and interesting rising international stars to join Tom Hanks in Inferno, the new film in Columbia Pictures’ Robert Langdon series, which has taken in more than $1.2 billion worldwide to date.

‘The Imagine Entertainment production, which has a screenplay by David Koepp based on the book by Dan Brown, is slated for release on October 14, 2016 and will begin principal photography at the end of April. The project’s executive producers are Dan Brown, Anna Culp, Bill Connor, and David Householter.

‘Inferno continues the Harvard symbologist’s adventures on screen: when Robert Langdon wakes up in an Italian hospital with amnesia, he teams up with Sienna Brooks, a doctor he hopes will help him recover his memories and prevent a madman from releasing a global plague connected to Dante’s “Inferno.”

‘Felicity Jones, an Oscar® nominee this year for her performance in The Theory of Everything, will star opposite Hanks as Dr. Sienna Brooks. Irrfan Khan, one of India’s biggest stars, best known for his roles in Slumdog Millionaire, Life of Pi, and The Lunchbox, takes the role of Harry Sims, also known as The Provost. French actor Omar Sy, best known for his work in the French mega-hit The Intouchables, as well as X-Men: Days of Future Past, the upcoming Jurassic World, and John Wells’ upcoming untitled project, will play Christoph Bruder. Sidse Babett Knudsen, star of the Danish television series “Borgen,” will portray Dr. Elizabeth Sinskey, the head of the World Health Organization. The filmmakers are also in talks with several other internationally recognized actors for major roles.

‘Commenting on the announcement, Howard said, “For this film, I wanted Tom Hanks to be surrounded by an international cast of actors whose energy will underscore Robert Langdon’s life-or-death peril, the high-stakes action he takes, and the global threat that he’s trying to prevent. Felicity, Irrfan, Omar, and Sidse have all broken through with recognition here in America as well as their home countries – they are phenomenal talents and we can’t wait to get started.”

‘”We’re thrilled to be making a third Robert Langdon film with Ron, Tom and Brian,” said Doug Belgrad, president, Sony Pictures Entertainment Motion Picture Group. “Inferno will deliver all of the excitement, intrigue and international adventure that audiences expect from a film based on Dan Brown’s huge selling Langdon book series. We can’t wait to see this character back on the big screen.”’