Stoked for Martin Scorsese’s biopic of Frank Sinatra, which if reports are true could either star Leonardo DiCaprio, George Clooney or Johnny Depp?
Asked about casting by Vulture, Scorsese says nothing’s been settled on and he’s been distracted with other projects. In fact he won’t start discussing the picture in earnest until February when “Shutter Island” opens. “I have meetings about it [the biopic in California]. Which will be in February, I think. I’ve sort of gone on to these other projects (the George Harrison documentary, the pilot for HBO show “Boardwalk Empire”).
Sounds like the project is a bit of a ways off, but good to hear there is still some movement on the Harrison doc which we’re greatly anticipating and haven’t heard from in months. But Scorsese did discuss “Sinatra” and the script at length.
What will the Sinatra movie be like?
The interesting thing about the Sinatra script — which is by Phil Alden Robinson — is that it spans his life from being a young child to his twenties, his thirties to his late seventies So it starts out with him in New Jersey as a little boy?
No it inter-cuts everything throughout time. So it starts out with him old and flashes back?
Not really, no. Got to find another way to do that. All those things came to mind, but have been done too much. With the Dean Martin biopic you’d once planned to make, you had very specific ideas for who would play the Rat Pack (John Travolta as Sinatra, Hugh Grant as Peter Lawford, Adam Sandler as Joey Bishop, etc.). Will you have any of those actors finally play those roles in your Sinatra movie?
I’m not sure now. That was almost ten years ago and the people we were thinking of are older. The casting is a very tricky thing, because you can’t say, “You’re going to play Sinatra, you’re going to play Dean Martin,” because who can play them, you know? You have to do something else, you’re not going to find that yet. Will the actor playing Sinatra sing?
I’m not sure yet, but I would think since there’s no one who can sing like Sinatra, you have to use his voice.
Can we at least hope for a start sometime in 2010? Or will the Harrison and HBO doc push this one’s start date to sometime 2011? That actually sounds more logical.
