“Turturro keeps urging us to do the ‘Jesus’ spin-off of his character,” Ethan Coen said earlier this year, adding with some serious sarcasm, “Yeah, uh huh…” For years, John Turturro has been more than open about his desire to make a movie based around his “The Big Lebowski” character Jesus Quintana, but was continually stalled by the Coens’ refusal to give their blessing to the project. But it would appear that his patience has run out (or they’ve finally acquiesced) and he’s just making it anyway.
READ MORE: The Best & The Rest: Every Coen Brothers Movie Ranked
Birth Movies Death is reporting that Turturro is already a couple of weeks into production on the ‘Big Lebowski’ spinoff in New York, which has the title “Going Places” (for a long time, Turturro had a working title of “100 Minutes With Jesus“). Also featuring Bobby Cannavale, Audrey Tautou and Susan Sarandon, the plot is apparently borrowed from Bertrand Blier‘s 1974 French film “Les valseuses,” and will see Turturro and Cannavale playing thieves Jesus and Petey, who square off against each other in a bid to give a woman, played by Tautou, her first orgasm. Um, maybe I understand now why the Coens were so reluctant to sign off on this, and they’re not involved in this production, so it’ll be interesting to see what their reaction is. And maybe the story explains Turturro’s original title.
“Going Places” currently has no studio home, and it’s not clear if Turturro has the intellectual property rights to be making this in the first place. But perhaps he’s hoping that if he can get it on film, the rest will follow. And if you’re thinking the premise is pretty gross, apparently even back in the ’70s it was considered obnoxiously sexist, so we’ll see how Turturro tweaks the material for the tastes of today.
Thoughts? Is this the kind of story you wanted to see about Jesus Quintana? Let us know in the comments section.