“The Counselor,” the first original screenplay by Cormac McCarthy, is set to begin shooting in just a few short weeks with Ridley Scott at the helm. The film follows the titular character (Michael Fassbender) who ventures into the world of drug dealing with deadly consequences, and it features a stellar cast including Javier Bardem, Cameron Diaz and Brad Pitt. In a conversation with Empire at Cannes, Pitt dished on his excitement about the project, saying, “I’ve read every word [McCarthy’s] published and most of them more than once. So this was a chance to do something of his and also work with Ridley again.”
Pitt plays the role of Westray, who helps Fassbender get ahold of a $20 million stash of cocaine. While Pitt cautions that his turn in the film will only amount to “doing a few days,” he’s more than capable of stealing the show. You don’t need much more proof of that than his big-screen debut as the hitchhiker in Scott’s “Thelma & Louise” or his turn as the stoner roommate of Christian Slater in the Quentin Tarantino-written and Tony Scott-directed “True Romance.”
Elsewhere at Cannes, Chris Pine talked up the long-delayed reboot of the Jack Ryan franchise, saying that it finally “looks like it’s happening. We have a script…and the beginnings of the production are happening.”
Kenneth Branagh, who directed last year’s “Thor,” has signed up to helm the forever-developing untitled film (formerly known as "Moscow"), which is rumored to have Ryan framed as an American spy in Russia and forced to go on the lam. Pine acknowledged that it’ll be a struggle to “make an American spy movie in 2012 that’s just as current and apropos to the world situation as it was in the Cold War era.” He also admitted to asking Alec Baldwin, the first Jack Ryan and Pine’s co-star in the upcoming animated film “Rise Of The Guardians,” for advice. “He urged me to hold onto it and attack it,” Pine explained.
No word yet on when the project might get rolling, but it sounds like Pine is ready whenever Paramount is. [Empire/Empire]