Even more news from Swedish director Lasse Hallström. On top of evidently just taking over the sex-change drama, “The Danish Girl” from Tomas Alfredson (“Let The Right One In”), starring Nicole Kidman and Gwyneth Paltrow, the “Dear John” director apparently has another high end project in the works according to his native media.
Apparently he is also set to go behind the camera for an upcoming on-screen union of real life couple Johnny Depp and Vanessa Paradis in “My American Lover,” the story of French feminist philosopher, writer and theorist Simone de Beauvoir and American novelist Nelson Algren.
Bullshit made up from the European media you say? Not so, Depp told BangShowbiz about this a few days ago and apparently it slipped under everyone’s radar.
“It’s called ‘My American Lover,’ ” he explained on February 25 of his new project. “Vanessa plays the French feminist Simone de Beauvoir and I play her lover Nelson Algren who is real macho.”
While Paradis is better known for her music than her acting, she most recently starred in Pascal Chaumeil’s “L’arnacoeur” which is due to hit European theaters later in 2010 and has been in a dozen or so films over the years. However, this will be the first time her and Depp have been on-screen together.
“My American Lover” will almost certainly be based on de Beauvoir’s “A Transatlantic Love Affair: Letters to Nelson Algren,” a collection of correspondences she sent Algren in the late 1940s. The letters center on their transatlantic affair and their travels together through Latin America in 1949.
Here’s the Amazon synopsis:
Simone de Beauvoir met Nelson Algren in Chicago in February 1947, when a mutual friend arranged for him to serve as her tour guide for two days. The attraction was immediate, and within two months they were in love. Because Algren was so alien to de Beauvoir’s world, she spent time describing events and people to him she might otherwise have taken for granted. The result is that de Beauvoir’s 300 surviving letters to Algren are unusually rich in detail–love letters with a conscious undercurrent of French social history. Translated and annotated by Kate Leblanc, they offer amusing insights into postwar Parisian life and characters, delivered with the charm of the nonnative writer.
The 20th century French writer-philosopher de Beauvoir is perhaps most famous for her tome, “The Second Sex” which explored women’s oppression, contemporary feminism and her open relationship with famous existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre (if you have no clue who these people are, you might want to question your education or reading habits).
Johnny Depp seems to be circling back to all the directors he worked with early on in his film career. Next year, Depp will reteam with Slavic filmmaker Emir Kusturica for his long-gestating Pancho Villa biopic. It will be their first collaboration since 1993’s highly underrated (and mostly because not many people have actually seen it) absurdist comedy, “Arizona Dream” co-starring Lily Taylor, Jerry Lewis and Faye Dunaway. Hallström previously worked with Depp on “What’s Eating Gilbert Grape?” (1993) and “Chocolat” (2000).
Considering Depp’s schedule, the earliest “My American Lover” could probably shoot would be spring 2011 when Kusturica’s epic is done shooting in Europe.
