Update: While Gere is, indeed, attached to Old Fires, Demme has since pulled out for undisclosed reasons. The original story can be read below.
Maybe I’m just a bad Jonathan Demme fan — still haven’t seen Swimming to Cambodia, for one thing — but as of these past few years yours truly has grown a bit frustrated with the guy, watching someone I’d consider a national treasure retract his involvement with feature films for… what, one Neil Young documentary after another? Yes, there’s still activity. Yes, there’s still effort exerted. Yes, people are even willing to buy a title and distribute it in some capacity — so maybe his narrative work shouldn’t begin to feel like a rare occurrence. They don’t even need to cost so much.
Among those who (somewhat selfishly) wish he’d get back to that for which he’s best-known, today brings good news: according to TheWrap, momentum is once more on the side of Old Fires, a drama that had seemingly gained Demme‘s interest in October of last year, yet went under in May. Although he’d never left the project, things are, 13 months out, more definitively falling into place — Richard Gere is now attached to star, a move which, by the looks of it, has encouraged Anonymous Content to start up more serious backing. This one’s struggled to get to the front, but, with any luck, production will commence in 2014.
As scripted by novelist Heather McGowan (also of the 2002 feature Tadpole), Old Fires revolves around “a world-renowned architect (Gere) who emerges from a coma in need of both physical and mental rehabilitation.” More than the typical procedures employed to get victims back in shape, the protagonist uses “his snarky female physical therapist [to help] repair his damaged relationship with his children and win back his wife’s love.”
Do you think Demme and Gere would make a fine pairing? Does Old Fires sound like the right material for them to collaborate on?