SHEEPS SHAPES

The front cover of our last issue featured Anthony Hopkins in Hannibal. Page 14 of this issue features Chris Rock in Down to Earth. Now, the two of them may be paired in Black Sheep, a story with a CIA setting.

Hopkins - who spent most of Hannibal eluding representatives of one US law-enforcement agency (the FBI) - will play a veteran of another (the CIA) in Sheep, which is due to be directed by Joel Schumacher and produced by Jerry Bruckheimer. When his CIA partner dies, Hopkins’ character recruits the guy’s identical twin (Rock) to finish the job, despite the fact that the latter has no previous connection with the agency.

The film, which is due to start this month and wrap before the strike deadline, will be the first of two collaborations between Schumacher and Bruckheimer - quite a departure from the former’s recent pared-down, indie-style films: the critically acclaimed Tigerland and the soon-to-be-released, single-set story, Phone Booth.

The second Schumacher-Bruckheimer outing looks like being the long-mooted big-budget version of the life and death of investigative Irish journalist Veronica Guerin. Guerin was murdered by the Dublin mob in June 1996, and the other version of her life story, directed by John Mackenzie and starring Joan Allen, was When The Sky Falls, which premiered in Toronto last autumn.

Incidentally, Colin Farrell - the young Irish actor who became a star in Schumacher’s Tigerland and followed it up by actually starring in Phone Booth - has replaced Matt Damon in Steven Spielberg’s Minority Report. The film is a futuristic thriller about cops who catch killers before they kill, thanks to a new programme which is able to predict murders. Tom Cruise stars as one of the cops who finds himself being pursued by another (Farrell) because the system predicts he will commit a murder.

Farrell - who is now in the $2.5-million-a-movie bracket - also replaced Edward Norton in Hart’s War, the story of a murder trial that takes place in a WWII prison camp. That film, which headlines Bruce Willis, is currently shooting in Prague, with Gregory Hoblit directing. When it finishes in early May, Farrell will immediately head off to the Minority Report set so that that, too, can wrap before the end of June.

BOY BOUNCES BACK

The recent departure of Michael De Luca from the head-of-production job at New Line seemed for a while to have taken one of the company’s high-profile projects down with it: the movie version of the Nick Hornby novel, About a Boy. The Weitz brothers - who hit the big time with American Pie and are also behind one of the films in this issue (see picture below) - were all set to do it. They were comparatively recent additions to the project, which Jane Rosenthal and Robert De Niro’s Tribeca Productions has had lodged at New Line since 1997. But, when De Luca left, the project was put into turnaround.

The Weitz brothers

Not for long, however. Within days of the announcement, Universal had picked it up, along with Hugh Grant who had been attached to star in the film. It was a role almost tailor-made for the actor (next to be seen in Bridget Jones’ Diary): that of a thirtysomething who tries to avoid commitment by only having relationships with single mothers, then finds himself forming a bond with the 12-year-old son of his latest conquest.

The central character has been turned into an American, although the London setting of the book has apparently been preserved (something which didn’t happen with the last Hornby adaptation, High Fidelity).

SHIPPING (AND OTHER) NEWS

Speaking of replacements, a couple of high-profile projects that we have reported here over the past couple of years are moving closer to production. The movie version of Annie L Proulx’s bestseller, The Shipping News, which started life as a John Travolta/Kelly Preston coupling in the spring of 1999, has moved - by way of Billy Bob Thornton and Meg Ryan - to Kevin Spacey and Cate Blanchett. The director will now be Lasse Hallstrom. Also in the cast are Judi Dench (who recently worked with Hallstrom on Chocolat) and Scott Glenn. Irwin Winkler will produce for Miramax and shooting is due to start this month (March). If it doesn’t, the bleak Nova Scotia winter which is such a feature of the book should be hard to reproduce. Not to mention it’ll be difficult to get it all in the can before the end of June.

And the remake of Francois Truffaut’s sci-fi flick, Fahrenheit 451 - first mentioned on these pages almost seven years ago in Preview 11 - has had another makeover and looks ready to ignite (the title refers to the temperature at which paper catches fire). The film - which Ray Bradbury was going to readapt from his own novel - was originally set to be produced by Mel Gibson’s company, Icon. Warners were going to release, and wanted Gibson himself in the central role of Fireman Montag. But it never really caught on, mainly because Gibson thought he was too old to play Montag. Now, the project has shifted over to Castle Rock, where Frank Darabont looks like directing it.

The latter, however, has another booking first: the Jim Carrey pic mentioned here in our last issue. Then, it was called Bijou; now, it’s been renamed The Majestic. But it’s still the story of a blacklisted screenwriter who finds love in a small town. And, since we last mentioned it, Darabont has found the woman who helps Carrey’s character find himself: Laurie Holden, whose highest-profile previous role was a recurring one in TV series The X-Files.