Marking his first feature in five years, Election and Drug War director Johnnie To has quietly embarked on his next project. Although no official details have been announced regarding the title or plot, HK01 (via Frank Yan) spotted To filming a scene with Hong Kong pop star Anson Lo, who plays a driver in the film. There’ll surely be more to come, but it’s exciting to see one of our great directors back at work.
Darren Aronofsky has found his next film and star. Following The Whale, he’ll direct Austin Butler in Caught Stealing, Deadline reports, a sports crime drama scripted by Charlie Huston based on his own book. The Sony Pictures project is described as an “adrenaline-soaked roller coaster ride” and will follow Butler as Hank Thompson, “a burned-out former baseball player, as he’s unwittingly plunged into a wild fight for survival in the downtown criminal underworld of ‘90s NYC.”
Just moments after announcing what was purportedly his next film, the Josh O’Connor-led Separate Rooms, Luca Guadagnino has become attached to another project, the dramatic thriller After the Hunt, set to star Julia Roberts. Set up at Amazon MGM Studios, Nora Garrett’s Tár-esque script follows “a college professor who faces a crossroads in confronting her own dark past when a standout student makes an accusation against one of her colleagues,” THR reports.
When it comes to ill-advised remakes (ahem, “reimaginings of the original novel”), another one is in the works. Director Scott Derrickson and writer C. Robert Cargill will adapt Davis Grubb’s 1953 novel The Night of the Hunter for Universal Pictures, Deadline reports. Famously adapted by Charles Laughton in his sole directorial effort, the story follows a serial killer posing as a preacher who worms his way into a family in order to retrieve $10,000 in stolen cash.
Jeremy Allen White is in talks to star as none other than Bruce Springsteen in Scott Cooper’s Deliver Me From Nowhere, Deadline reports. An adaptation of the Warren Zanes book, the A24 production will track the New Jersey native’s creation of his seminal, Terrence Malick-influenced album “Nebraska.” Production is aiming to begin this fall, with Springsteen’s involvement.
In another musician biopic update, James Mangold has dropped the first official set image of Timothée Chalamet as Bob Dylan in his forthcoming biopic A Complete Unknown.