From a shot-by-shot remake of “Psycho,” to the pilot of the recently canceled “Boss,” to low budget wonders like “Elephant,” to Oscar success stories like “Good Will Hunting” and “Milk,” the career of Gus Van Sant has been anything but safe and predictable. And just when we thought we had the director all figured out, he’s gone ahead and thrown another curveball.
Movieline recently added a luncheon with the director and cast for the upcoming “Promised Land” and Van Sant revealed the oddball project he’s cooking up. He said he’s writing a “martial arts” film that’s “a little bit of a superhero movie and a little bit of Stephen Chow,” referring to the writer/director/star of “Kung Fu Hustle.” Um, okay then. The director elaborated that he was inspired by a bag lady he saw at the corner of Hollywood and Gower in Los Angeles, who he immediately judged as “very frail” before thinking to himself that he really has no idea who she is, and for all he knows, she could “kick my ass.”
So what will it be about? “I have to keep writing it,” he said, though he did state that it’s set in “a small area of Hollywood that is besieged by crime” and follows a group of regular folks who “get together to clean it up.”
Whether or not it ever gets made remains to be seen. We’ll have to wait and see, but it wouldn’t be the first time Van Sant put together a script that didn’t see the light of day. In the recent THR director’s roundtable, he revealed that he was once asked to write a script about a bathroom attendant at the request of a studio executive and it turned into a story about the Wall Street collapse. And as great as that sounds, it didn’t get made. But a take on superheroes by Gus Van Sant? We hope someone rolls the dice on that.
