ABOVE HIM THE WAVES

Matthew McConaughey - who was sort of on the cover of our last issue, theoretically present in the camera lens poking through the words EDtv - recently donned naval uniform to take command of Universal's U-571. This is not - as those familiar with studio methods of listing projects may suspect - some far-distant future movie, but the actual name of the German U-boat in the frequently delayed action flick with which writer/director Jonathan Mostow is finally following up his hit thriller, Breakdown (Preview 26).

McConaughey plays the US navy captain who is sent to retrieve a decoding device hidden aboard the stranded German submarine. Others aboard U-571, on which production began in Rome and Malta at the turn of the year, include Harvey Keitel, Bill Paxton, David Keith and Jake Weber.

STRANGE DIAZ INDEED

Back when we first featured her in Preview (in her initial starring role opposite Jim Carrey in The Mask), getting photos of Cameron Diaz wasn't easy. The film was still in production, the special effects hadn't been done and the non-special-effects shots hadn't been approved. So we had to make do with a set of photos of the sort that TV companies usually put out, with the star posing cheerfully in front of a neutral backdrop.

No such problem these days. Even if Diaz didn't put in appearances at lots of events and get photographed regularly by the paps, there are now enough film stills of her to paper a small warehouse. In the past 12 months alone, the Long Beach-born actress has been in hit gross-out movie There's Something About Mary; inkie-black comedy Very Bad Things; and Oliver Stone's football film, Any Given Sunday.

But she's never played dead before. And that's just what she is doing in Fine Line's Invisible Circus, which is due to start shooting in France this month (May). The film is about a young woman heading off to Paris to find out what happened to her sister (Diaz), who committed suicide there. Invisible Circus will be directed by Adam Brooks, who also wrote the screenplay (adapted from a novel by Jennifer Egan).

Speaking of Carrey - who, after The Truman Show, must now surely replace Steven Spielberg as the Academy Awards' biggest shut-out - he will be reteaming with the Peter and Bob Farrelly (who directed him in Dumb and Dumber and did the same for Diaz in Mary) for a film called Me, Myself and Irene, in which he will play a Long Island cop with a dual-personality problem. As long as he keeps taking the pills, he's OK. But, when he forgets, he becomes someone else. Trouble is, both his original self and the someone else he turns into fall in love with the same woman: the eponymous Irene, a role which has yet to be cast.

Carrey recently wrapped the Andy Kaufman biopic, The Man on the Moon, directed by Milos Forman. And he will follow Irene with the Dr Seuss movie, How The Grinch Stole Christmas, which Ron Howard will direct and which should be out for Thanksgiving 2000. Carrey's other pipeline project, The Incredible Mr Limpet, has been on hold, however, ever since Steve Oedekerk dropped out as director.

PSYCHO REDUX (NOT REMADE)

With Leonardo DiCaprio safely stranded on a beach in Thailand, the movie version of Brett Easton Ellis' edgy bestseller American Psycho - which was briefly elevated to megamovie status this time last year as a vehicle for the world's most famous shipwreck victim - has happily reverted to what it was going to be in the first place: a small-scale, carefully crafted art movie directed by Mary Harron (I Shot Andy Warhol).

The title role - that of a Harvard graduate whose yuppie fantasies centre around the torture and murder of his (mainly female) victims - has (as previously reported here) reverted to Harron's original choice: Christian Bale, seen most recently in the lead role of producer Jeremy Thomas' directorial debut, All the Little Animals, and as the reporter tracking down the vanished glam rock star in Velvet Goldmine.

He is joined in the cast by Chloe Sevigny, who made her debut in Larry Clark's controversial Kids and has since been seen in Steve Buscemi's Trees Lounge and Whit Stillman's The Last Days of Disco, plus Jared Leto, Willem Dafoe, Reese Witherspoon and Samantha Mathis. The script for Psycho is adapted from Ellis' novel by Harron and Guinevere Turner, star and co-writer of Go Fish - who also appears in American Psycho - and featured in Preview when she played the dominatrix in Preaching to the Perverted (a performance which recently won her Best Actress at the Festival du Jeune Comédien in Béziers, southern France).

TITON REDEVELOPED

Following plans hatched at last year's Havana Film Festival, UK-based telecine company Innovation TK is teaming up with the Cuban Cinematheque and the Foundation for New Latin American Cinema to transfer at least one classic Cuban film to video using TK's ground-breaking 'Y-Front' process.

The aim is to give heightened visibility to Latin American films by making them available to a new generation of TV and video viewers. The first film to be transferred will be one of those directed by Tomas Guttiérez Alea - known to friends and colleagues as 'Titón' - who pretty much launched Cuban cinema's international reputation with Death of a Bureaucrat in 1966, followed by Memories of Underdevelopment two years later, and was more recently responsible for the international art-house hit, Strawberries and Chocolate (1994). Alea died in 1997.