Geez, with all the testosterone flying around this film, you might get pregnant just from reading the cast list of Billy Bob Thornton‘s next effort behind the camera, “Jayne Mansfield’s Car.”
With Robert Duvall already set, Deadline reveals that John Hurt, Kevin Bacon, Robert Patrick and Ray Stevenson have rounded out the cast for the film with the young and relatively unknown John Patrick Amedori in the lead role. Interestingly, neither Dwight Yoakam or Dennis Quaid, mentioned previously, are listed, leading us to think to they may have dropped out (Yoakam is on tour during the shooting dates). Regardless, it’s an intriguing round up of guys for what promises to be an equally compelling film.
Written by Thornton and Tom Epperson, the film is described as a “comedy with dramatic overtones” revolving “around the culture clash of two families, from different continents, in 1969.” At the beginning of the year, Duvall outlined the plot, saying, “It’s about a guy in between WWI and WWII who raises a family after his wife left him for an Englishman and moved to England…When the wife dies, she asks to be brought back to Alabama to be buried, and at that point the character hasn’t seen her in 20 or 30 years. The two families — her original family she abandoned and her English family — meet and then things get really interesting.” It sure sounds like it.
Thornton’s efforts behind the camera have been spotty at best, with nothing coming close to matching the brilliance he showed the first time out with “Sling Blade.” But this sounds like it could match that film’s mixture of humor and pathos, so let’s hope so. Filming begins in Georgia on June 22nd.
