HE'LL BE BACK

He’s done car-chase movies - the excellent Breakdown, which we featured a few years ago. He’s done submarines (U-571, which we featured last spring). Now he’s ready for the big guy.

‘He’, of course, is director Jonathan Mostow and the film to which his name recently became attached is Terminator 3, which has been under discussion for a while. Arnold Schwarzenegger (who was in both the previous outings, and without whom a third would be unthinkable, even if he is now 54) and Edward Furlong (who was in No 2, aka Judgment Day) are both set to star. The problem was finding a director.

If all goes well with the various discussions - the ones between Mostow and C-2’s Mario Kassar and Andy Vajna; and the ones between the two sides in the Hollywood-strike dispute - Terminator 3 could start shooting this summer. But those are big ‘ifs’.

CANTET CAN

Success has done nothing to blunt French director Laurent Cantet’s concern with the injustices of the modern workplace. His directorial debut, Ressources humaines (Human Resources) won both the Critics’ Prize at the 2000 European Film Awards and two Césars (France’s Oscars) for best first film and most promising newcomer - the latter for Jalil Lespert, the only professional actor in the film.

Cantet’s first film was about a young management hotshot whose relationship with his father, a diehard trades unionist, forces him to rethink his priorities when the factory where they both work starts laying off staff. The new film has a similar theme. Entitled L’emploi du temps, it is about another management consultant who loses his job, but tries to hide the fact from his friends by pretending he has got a new position in Geneva. The resulting deception becomes a full-time (albeit unpaid) job in its own right. The film is due out in France towards the end of the year.

PACINO'S WATERLOO

And, while we’re still down among the French, an ambitious new project is apparently bubbling merrily away on Charles Gassot’s stove.

Gassot, you may (or may not) recall, is the French producer who recently complained that his Best Foreign Film Oscar-nominee, Le goût des autres, wasn’t getting the number of screens it deserved for a successful US release. It thus, he added, had no real chance of the Oscar (as if anything did in the year of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon).

Round about the same time, however, Gassot was doing rather better in Berlin, where the Patrice Chéreau film he produced, the English-language Intimacy, starring Kerry Fox and Patrick Rylance in a series of graphic sexual couplings, surprised most festivalgoers by making off with the Golden Bear.

Anyway, Gassot’s intriguing new project will once again be directed by Chéreau, will once again be in English, but will deal this time with a very French subject. Not, of course, that I would wish to imply that two people having frequent sex is in any way unFrench. But I think you would agree that it’s just slightly more unFrench than Napoleon, which is who the new Gassot/Chéreau movie will be about.

There have, of course, been lots of Napoleon movies before, some of them (like Abel Gance’s 1926 classic) even directed by French people. The new one, though, is set to star Al Pacino - or that’s what Gassot says.

No start date or further details yet, though one assumes, French auteurist cinema being what it is, that the screenplay will be by Chéreau himself. As for what it will mean to have Pacino playing the driven, diminutive Emperor, discretion - legal as much as natural - forbids further comment.

DIRECTING (AFTER) TRAFFIC

If you’d told me when we were making Traffic that it would make $70 million in the United States,” noted Steven Soderbergh recently in Berlin, “I would have said you were stoned.” That was then. The film has now powered well past the $100-million mark and picked up three Oscars, including one for Soderbergh himself.

Also reaping the benefits is writer Stephen Gaghan, who similarly scored a gong at the Shrine. He makes his directorial debut on Paramount’s Abandon, which started shooting at the end of April. Gaghan’s deal, however, was signed and sealed long before he got the Oscar. Abandon - a thriller set in an Ivy League college - is a script he wrote some time ago, and the only thing which prevented it from going into production earlier was a little difficulty pulling together all the financial elements (Spyglass Entertainment is currently in partnership with Paramount on the film).

The movie is expected to star Benjamin Bratt - who played the consort role at the Oscars, accompanying Best Actress-winner Julia Roberts to the ceremony - and Katie Holmes.

AND FINALLY...

On a not-altogether serious note, the next time you fly and are moved to reflect that flight attendants don’t seem to get any younger, you might like to fantasise about A View from the Top, a Miramax movie due out sometime next year.

The two leading flight attendants in that film will be played by Kelly Preston and Gwyneth Paltrow. And, while Paltrow’s casting is only a little unusual - she is not, after all, the kind of person you’d expect to see dishing out your in-flight peanuts - that of Preston is downright ironical.

The actress’ husband, you will remember, is John Travolta, who has been flying himself and his family around in bigger and bigger private jets since the days of Saturday Night Fever. Which means that Mrs T hasn’t flown on a commercial airline since… well, she can hardly remember: chez Travolta, it isn’t a question of calling the travel agent, but of saying, “Honey, do you have a minute…?”