After spending some time in the blockbuster arena with the 2010 Angelina Jolie-starring espionage flick “Salt,” and this summer’s YA adaptation “The Giver,” Australian director Phillip Noyce will finally be helming a film with no action set pieces again. Per Coming Soon, Noyce will tackle the long-gestating adaptation of Phillip Roth’s critically acclaimed novel “American Pastoral” and he’s cast Ewan McGregor as the lead. Published in 1997, the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel follows “a blonde Jewish businessman living in Newark, New Jersey, whose conventional life is disturbed by the political upheaval of the ’60s under the Presidency of Lyndon B. Johnson.” Noyce is aiming to shoot “American Pastoral” in early 2015 from a script from “The Lincoln Lawyer” screenwriter John Romero.
Deadline reports, via the actor’s Twitter account, that William H. Macy will be boarding Mel Gibson’s slow-moving comeback train in the action thriller “Blood Father.” Following Gibson as an ex-con who reunites with his estranged teenage daughter to save her when drug dealers want to kill her, the “Taken”-esque film has already begun shooting. “Mesrine” director Jean-Francois Richet is directing from a script from “The Town” screenwriter Peter Craig.
Buried in a profile about the actress, the Daily Mail has revealed that Gemma Arterton starring alongside Idris Elba in the South West London-set “gritty, contemporary and poignant multilayered drama,” “One Square Mile.” The hyperlink film will, in the grand tradition of films like “Amores Perros” and “Traffic,” follow “a series of misplaced characters from a wide range of backgrounds as their lives cross paths.” Or as Arterton put it, “it’s about ‘love, action and gangsters in London.’” The film is directed by Michael Caton-Jones and written by Leon F. Butler.
Continuing his fight to stay relevant, Kevin Costner will now take a role in “Criminal,” Ariel Vromen’s follow-up to “The Iceman.” Variety reports that the Douglas Cook and David Weisberg co-written film will center on Costner as “a ruthless killer who, rather than spend the rest of his life in jail, chooses to be used in a medical experiment in which the brain of a recently murdered field operative is implanted in his head.” Wacky stuff, indeed but the script is still being written so pitch your ideas for a better title than “Criminal” below. How about “Brain-Off?”
The Wrap reports that “Veep” star Reid Scott is joining “The Intern” with Robert De Niro and Anne Hathaway. Nancy Meyers (“Something’s Gotta Give,” “It’s Complicated“) wrote the script and will direct this one about a fashion website that takes on a senior citizen as an intern. Much hilarity will certainly follow.
Former world welterweight champion Victor Ortiz has joined the boxing pic “Southpaw” starring Jake Gyllenhaal, Rachel McAdams and Forest Whitaker, reports Deadline. Antoine Fuqua gets behind the camera for this tale about a lefty welterweight who fights his way to a championship title as he battles various tragedies in his personal life and wins back the love of his daughter.
