Production: Claude Léger, Michael Cowan, Jason Piette, Eric Altmayer, Nicholas Altmayer.
Director: Gérard Pirès.
Cast: Stephen Dorff, Natasha Henstridge.
Starts: April 2001, Montreal.
Subject: The first English-language film by record-breaking French director Gérard Pirès (Taxi) stars Dorff as a thief who pulls off a $20-million robbery. Using a mixture of cunning and extreme-sports skills, he outwits the Mafia, the cops and even his girlfriend (Henstridge).
International distribution: Fusion International.

Production: Tom Rosenberg, Gary Lucchesi, Gary Goldman, for Lakeshore Entertainment and Screen Gems.
Director: Mark Pellington.
Cast: Richard Gere, Laura Linney, Debra Messing, Will Patton, Lucinda Jenney, Alan Bates.
Started: January 24, 2001, Pittsburgh.
Subject: A Washington Post journalist (Gere), helped by a local cop (Linney), discovers strange forces in the small West Virginia town of Point Pleasant while investigating the car accident that killed his wife.
International distribution: Lakeshore/Sony Screen Gems.

SALLES SAILS ON

A couple of years ago, Brazilian director Walter Salles was one of the hottest new properties on the international circuit, thanks to his Berlin Golden Bear-winner and Oscar only-just-also-ran Central Station. Now finally, after another low-budget Brazilian movie (the TV-oriented millennial tale O primeira dia/The First Day), Salles is in line to make not one but two English-language films.

The highest-profile (but not necessarily the first to go) is Robert Redford’s Che Guevara project, The Motorcycle Diaries, based on a book by the Argentinian-born Cuban revolutionary hero about his travels through Central America on the eponymous bike. It is not to be confused with another project, Tanya, which is (or was) being developed by Mick Jagger’s Jagged Films, with Antonio Banderas due to play Che (as he did in Evita).

The other Salles project is The Assumption of the Virgin, which is set to star Juliette Binoche, with Anthony Minghella’s wife, Carolyn Choa, producing. Banderas, incidentally, is currently in Brian De Palma’s new movie, Femme fatale, alongside Jean Reno and X-Person Rebecca Romijn-Stamos (she was the one covered in blue scales). The film, presently shooting in Paris, will move to Cannes for sequences set during the Festival.

TWICE BURNT

And finally, anyone who thought the new regime in Russia might be less fertile ground for actor/director Nikita Mikhalkov can think again. His nationalist Russian epic The Barber of Siberia having resolutely failed to set the rest of the world alight (although it did do pretty well in Mother Russia), Mikhalkov is reportedly returning to safer ground for his next movie: a sequel to his Oscar-winner, Burnt by the Sun. It will be set during World War II, and will follow the character of Nadia, the child whose observations of the strange ways of adults gave the earlier film much of its perspective and piquancy.

That character was, of course, played by the director’s daughter, also called Nadia (Mikhalkov himself similarly starred in the original film), who has now grown up sufficiently to play a nurse in a wartime field hospital. The budget is said to be $25 million, and Russian television - which is putting up most of the funding - is talking ambitiously about involving Steven Spielberg as a consultant (or even a co-director). Spielberg himself has so far to comment on the suggestion, which makes it seem a little like saying Michel Roux is going to do the catering on your film.