The UK’s Film4 have updated their current development slate, and with films like Shane Meadows’ “The Stone Roses: Made Of Stone,” Ben Wheatley’s “A Field in England” and Jonathan Glazer’s “Under The Skin” all edging their way closer to release, we’ve now got news of some of the new projects these directors have underway.
Andrea Arnold’s fourth feature, and her first since 2011’s “Wuthering Heights,” will be a US-set drama called “Mag Crew.” The film is apparently inspired by “teenage magazine sales crews” and looks set to shoot in the US in 2014 after the script is completed later this year. It will be Arnold’s first film set outside of her native UK, and we imagine that means we can probably expect to see it sometime in 2015.
Paddy Considine and Shane Meadows are both developing original dramatic features, meanwhile, and as much as we’d also like to see them working together again, both of their respective features sound fascinating. Meadows is developing “a biopic of Nottinghamshire cyclist Tommy Simpson who died of exhaustion during the 1967 Tour de France,” and as is always the case for Meadows, Warp Films will produce. It’s a project that the director has had in the works for some time and was probably delayed by the very immediate opportunity presented to him by The Stone Roses. It will be nice to see the director deliver his first straight dramatic feature since 2008.
Considine, a big boxing fan whose favorite film is actually “Rocky,” will be exploring his passion for “The Years of the Locust.” It’s an adaptation of “[writer] Jon Hotten’s account of match-fixing and murder in the 1980s Florida boxing world.” He’ll be reteaming with his “Tyrannosaur” producer Diarmid Scrimshaw, and a Film4 exec also described the project as “big scale,” so it will be fascinating to see what Considine does with a slightly bigger budget. [Screen Daily]