2008’s Hancock is by far one of my favourite superhero films of all time, making this news one of the best things I’ve heard in some time. Rumours of a sequel have been circling pretty much since the film was released, especially when you take into account a) the immense potential it has for a sequel, like most superhero films, and b) the fact it took in $620m. from a $150m. budget. (The second part is naturally less a consideration for us than it is for the studios.)

Director Peter Berg has been speaking to ComicBookMovie, and gave a brief update on the sequel, which is definitely good news for us fans of the first film.

“We’ve been talking about the sequel between us, Will Smith, [producers] Michael Mann and Akiva Goldman and myself. We’re all interested, but we literally just have trouble getting into the same room at the same time. We did have a series of meetings last year and started to hash out an idea for sequel – and Will Smith actually had the idea – so I think it will happen, it’s just a question of timing.”

Ridiculously brilliant news. I’m completely fine with being patient if I know that something should be coming. And if it’s Will Smith with the idea, and everyone else is on board, let’s hope that can only mean good things.

When news of the sequel first started circling, Charlize Theron said that she’d gladly reprise her role, which is excellent news. And I’d imagine that Jason Bateman would be happy to return as well; he and Theron had such great chemistry on screen. The real question mark is of course the villain – who it will be in the world of the film, and who it will be playing them – and there’s a good chance that that’s the idea Smith has had for the sequel.

As you can imagine, Smith is generally a very busy man, and having wrapped Men in Black 3, his next film, After Earth, will see him working with M. Night Shyamalan, and the scale of that project means it will no doubt take some time to get done. Beyond that, there’s been talk of a Bad Boys 3 as well as an Independence 2 (and 3), so if those sequels do happen after After Earth, then he may not have time for Hancock in the next few years. But fear not, because it’s already been quite a few years since the film came out and clearly they’re all still talking about it and Smith’s just come up with the idea for the sequel. So we can all be patient, because you just know this is going to be awesome. And I’m really hoping that they can get John Powell to return to score the film, because the music from the first is genuinely incredible. More news as we get it.

We’ve already seen respected filmmakers like Martin Scorsese, Alexander Payne and Michael Mann lend their considerable talents to the small screen, and now none other than Ethan and Joel Coen will be joining those celebrated names.

Collider is reporting that the quirky siblings are to executive produce the oddly-titled HarveKarbo for Ron Howard and Brian Grazer’s Imagine TV. Co-created with Phil Johnston (Cedar Rapids), the show will focus on a Los Angeles-based private investigator who constantly comes into contact with the who’s who of Hollywood (wonder if that means he’ll mingle with a real-life, Entourage-style mix of celebs?)

It’s early days yet of course (the pilot has to impress before a full series is commissioned) but if the Coens have agreed to get behind it, there must be something special in there.

No word yet if the brothers will be directing that first episode but it would be fun to see if their idiosyncratic style of filmmaking could fit into the more rigorous mould of TV.

When I wrote about this film back in February of 2010 it was to announce the casting of Jeffrey Dean Morgan, then fresh from his Watchmen duties. I hadn’t seen anything other than the general synopsis for the film and drew a comparison with Zodiac, something that this new trailer appears to compound.

Morgan teams up with Sam Worthington in Ami Mann’s film based, as the title card in the trailer has it, on the true story of two detectives ploughing through a long running unsolved case in the titular fields. The trailer sets the scene nicely and though a few guns are brandished you get the impression that this is a slow burning film which will focus on the central dynamic as the story unfolds. Jessica Chastain and Chloe Moretz also star along with, if IMDb is to be believed, Sheryl Lee and if the quick shots in the trailer of bodies wrapped in plastic are anything to go seems entirely appropriate.

The film will open at the Venice Film Festival before its 7th of October release date in the US. No date yet for its UK date, but hopefully this one will be worthy of a theatrical run here.

Sourcery: Deadline

All is very much busy on the remake front with news from Deadline that director Mimi Leder has chosen her next big budget project – a new adaptation of famed World War One novel, All Quiet on the Western Front.

The story (which was turned into a 1930 Oscar-winning film, and remade again as a TV movie in 1979) focuses on a group of German soldiers’ extreme physical and mental stress during the war, and their subsequent feelings of disconnection from society upon returning home after the battles.

Up until she was recently ousted by Catherine Hardwicke with Twilight, Leder was Hollywood’s biggest money-making female director (a title gained via her 1998 meteor disaster epic, Deep Impact). She’s been away from the big screen for a few years now, working in the TV industry (where she first made her name) and she recently directed the season finale of Luck, the forthcoming Michael Mann-produced HBO series that stars Dustin Hoffman.

Following Martin Scorsese’s successful dalliance with the small screen, not one but two legendary figures from cinema are involved in the new HBO horseracing drama, Luck.

The preview below of the series (which is due late 2011/early 2012) boasts the starry presence of Dustin Hoffman in the cast, with Heat/The Insider auteur Michael Mann onboard as executive producer and director of the pilot episode.

Hoffman isn’t the only big name the makers have managed to sign on either. Amongst the other fine supporting players are such respected thesps as Michael Gambon, Ian Hart, Dennis Farina, Joan Allen and Nick Nolte.

Mann of course made his name via TV (aside from being an executive producer on famed 80’s cop show Miami Vice, he early CV also includes writing credits on another favourite, Starsky and Hutch) which makes his return back to the world with Luck all the more exciting.

Courtesy of The Playlist

The brilliant writer/director, Michael Mann, is looking to direct an upcoming thriller, Gold, THR reports. And I think the fact that Mann is interested enough in the script to want to direct it pretty much guarantees it’s something we should all already be very much looking forward to. I know I am.

Mann will be teaming up with Paul Haggis (The Next Three Days, Crash), who was initially to direct the film but had to pull out to focus on other projects. Haggis is now going to be producing the film, alongside man and Michael Nozik, who worked with Haggis producing The Next Three Days.

Gold will be,

“a contemporary thriller in the vein of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, set around a ruthless search for the precious metal.”

I have to admit, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948) is a little bit before my time, and it’s not something I can say I’ve ever seen. But it was directed by the wildly popular John Huston, and stars that little-known actor, Humphrey Bogart, and with an 8.5/10 rating on IMDb, you can’t go too wrong.

The film has been scripted by Patrick Massett and John Zinman, who together wrote the screenplay for the 2001 Lara Croft: Tomb Raider movie, and more recently have written and co-executive produced TV’s Friday Night Lights and The Chicago Code. The pair clearly work incredibly well together, and for Mann and Haggis to have both seen something they liked in the script, I think we’ve got every reason to expect another brilliant Mann-directed film to be coming our way. It’s still early days yet, and no cast has yet been attached, but I’m really hoping that this will start to be developed sooner rather than later.

It’s been almost 5 years since actor-turned-director Todd Field’s second feature, Little Children, was released to almost universal acclaim, and now, after a couple of false starts (one of which was an adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian), it looks like he finally has a project ready to go.

Indie Wire has revealed that a project by the name of Hubris has fallen into the director’s hands, it this looks likely to be his next feature.

Written by Bobby Moresco (a co-writer on Crash) it’s a real-life gangster saga inspired by a 2007 Playboy article called Boosting the Big Tuna, which was based on the FBI trial regarding the murders of the men who broke into and robbed the house of the notorious Chicago mafia boss Tony Accardo (also known as Big Tuna) in the late 70’s. Within a month, five of the suspected thieves were found brutally murdered and a couple were reported to have been excessively tortured too.

Sounds like a departure from Field’s previous work, both which were much smaller in scale, contemporary family-led dramas (particularly his 2001 debut, In the Bedroom), but it should be interesting to see what he can do with material like this. The story has proved engaging enough that another, equally gifted filmmaker (Michael Mann) has begun developing his own script too.

This is an tasty piece of pre-production news which could be a potential game-changer for the world of 3D. During an electronics convention in Las Vegas (on a panel with fellow filmmakers Michael Mann and Oliver Stone) Aussie auteur Baz Luhrmann revealed that he has workshopped his upcoming project The Great Gatsby in 3D. The three directors were there to discuss the benefits of Blu-ray when Luhrmann mentioned his dalliances with the format.

We know that 3D is now being utilised by directors who initially, weren’t perhaps the most obvious advocators of the technology (Martin Scorsese’s next feature Hugo Cabret is currently filming in this style), but to even consider doing The Great Gatsby that way would open the medium up to a genre which, in turn, could finally see 3D become completely integrated into all Hollywood products, and not just how it exists now as the preserve of fantasy-based features (don’t forget that Cabret is a kid’s film which exists within a dream-like, otherworldly setting).

The article (by The Hollywood Reporter) does mention however, that Luhrmann has yet to decide whether he’ll used 3D to shoot his adaptation of the 1920’s-set literary classic. Nevertheless, this does pose an intriguing development for a format which has only gained serious momentum in a little over a year.

Michael Mann seems to have settled on his next cinema feature, having chosen one of the possible projects he’s had in development for the last few months.

He will be tackling the crime story Big Tuna, which is a biopic of Chicago mob boss Tony Accardo and his protégé who eventually replaced him, Sam Giancana. Mann has procured the services of Up in the Air scriptwriter Sheldon Turner to help bring this story to the screen.

Fan of The Insider director may be interested to learn that before he embarks on this project, he is currently following in the footsteps of fellow auteur Martin Scorsese by directing the pilot episode of a new drama for HBO. Based around the world of gambling, Luck is due to start airing sometime early next year in the US.

News via Variety.

Though Michael Mann’s recent Public Enemies didn’t light fires at the box office it was an enjoyable period piece with Johnny Depp and Marion Cotillard doing a lot of the hard work.

We reported back in July that Sky were to bring many of HBO’s series to the UK, and this included Luck, which had Mann pulling on his executive producing trousers for the series which was created by Deadwood’s David Milch. Doing the press rounds the FT (via Deadline) spoke to Mann who revealed that he is looking at two potential directorial projects.

One is an adaptation of Agincourt, the celebrated Bernard Cromwell novel, whose plot Deadline sum up as,

[Bernard Cromwell's Agincourt is] a bestselling novel that focuses on a young man with a death sentence on his head who is saved when his skills with the bow catch the attention of king Henry V.

The archer develops into a warrior and falls in love with a young woman whose virtue he saved from a lecherous priest, and he becomes the portal to the bloody Battle of Agincourt, made famous by Shakespeare’s Henry V

The other project is Big Tuna, a Chicago based mob movie telling the story of Tony Accardo and his successor, Sam Giancana which would place Mann on more familiar ground than the alternative. Would you want to see Mann move back in time or stick a little closer to home?

Sky have signed an exclusive five-year deal, worth an estimated £150m, with HBO for UK broadcast rights to their programmes. The deal, which includes access to previous HBO series’ including Curb Your Enthusiasm and The Sopranos, will see all HBO programmes shown on UK Sky channels shortly after their US premieres.

Boardwalk Empire, Martin Scorsese’s adapted serial, will be the first show to air as part of the multi-million pound deal. The series, which stars Steve Buscemi, Michael Pitt, Kelly MacDonald and Michael Shannon, will air in the UK shortly after it’s US premiere in September. The deal is also set include upcoming series’ such as Games of Throne, and Luck, a new drama by Michael Mann and Dustin Hoffman.

Sky’s managing director of entertainment, Sophie Turner Laing, said of the deal, “Like HBO, we believe that innovative, high-quality content is worth paying for. We are therefore delighted to have partnered with one of the most renowned names in television. HBO has demonstrated year after year the opportunity for pay television to push creative boundaries and create must see TV.” To which HBO’s president, Charles Schreger, added “We are enormously encouraged by the ongoing success story of pay TV in the UK and Ireland and it makes sense for us strategically to find a partner who can sustain a real commitment to investing in content.”

It seems Sky are pulling out all the stops to ensure it has the best of US TV series, especially now that previous acquisitions Lost and Prison Break have come to an end.

Reported by: Digitalspy

Easily one of the most impressive and charismatic of the Watchmen performances came from Jeffrey Dean Morgan as The Comedian, and his star continues to rise with a number of interesting projects including The Losers and the recently announced, Unblinking Eye.

Today we’ve learned from Bloody Disgusting that Morgan will team up with another breakout star in recent years, Sam Worthington, in the Michael Mann produced true story, Texas Killing Fields, or as it may be known, The Fields.

Telling the story of a pair of detectives from different parts of America, bought together, to try and uncover the cause of two decades worth of homicides in the refinery wastelands of Texas.

Mann’s daughter Ami Canaan Mann will direct this Don Ferrarone script with shooting to start this April – while it sounds like it has a touch of the Zodiacs to me, Morgan and Worthington have me interested.

“I like baseball, movies, good clothes, fast cars and you. What else do you need to know?“

Public Enemies is Michael Mann’s first venture into true-life territory since 1999′s The Insider. He has long been a master of slick fictionalised crime – his CV is a roll call of criminal capers and cops. The first twenty minutes of Public Enemies is this familiar Mann ““ the man who made Heat, Collateral and Miami Vice is here you think. The screen, the very room filled with slick staccato sights and sounds. It is cool; it looks period but feels contemporary, fast paced; a jail break, a bank heist, bang, bang, rapid-fire images, bang, bang. A car crests a hill with the robbers on the running boards clutching hostages to them, pretty girls, big guns, devil-may-care men; Gangsters. It explodes out of the screen burning with the same white-hot intensity that Mann believes fuelled John Dillinger in the final, fantastical, thirteen months of his life.

Oh. It’s all a little bit style-over-content. The suits are sharp, the cars are fast but you had hoped for a little more, and then”¦the humanity. The heart of Public Enemies is so straightforward and unabashed that it rather creeps up on you. The score helps; Elliot Goldenthal, who had previously scored Heat for Mann, wrings your emotions with subtle efficiency but, in the main, the credit must go to Depp.

Johnny Depp is so much a part of popular consciousness that it’s easy to forget how extraordinarily good he is. He doesn’t so much play John Dillinger as inhabit him, body and soul. He moves differently ““ this is not Captain Jack loping and swooning, this man is coiled tight and ready to spring at you even in repose, even as his eyes tell another tale. There is knowing and calculation in this haunted man, awareness of time spinning counter-clockwise and running out, away from him. When hatcheck girl Billie Frechette asks him what he wants his reply is simple:

“I want everything”¦right now!”

Marion Cotillard’s Billie and her naked trust in Dillinger bring out the man beneath the layers of legend. John Dillinger may be the Robin Hood of American folklore today but he was also a young man who died without reaching his 32nd birthday. He loved movies, and the final moments of a bespectacled Depp sitting in The Biograph cinema with images of Clark Gable as a Dillinger-esque gangster dancing across the lenses will undoubtedly secure him a statuette at next years Oscars. He plays a life squeezed into a baker’s dozen months with such conviction that you are captivated by his spiral.

Depp is ably matched by co-star Christian Bale whose role in Public Enemies is rather more significant than Johnny-biased trailers may have you believe. His portrayal of G-man Melvin Purvis is all stoic determination but the parallels between his journey and Dillinger’s punctuate as his conscience and values are sacrificed in the pursuit of Public Enemy Number One. He too has ghosts, but his ghosts are of what is yet to be. When Frechette is brutalised in an interrogation and he swoops into the room to save her he may as easily be Dillinger himself as an agent of Hoover. To read what became of Purvis in the closing credits is poignant because Bale so eloquently communicates the price the man paid. Cotillard’s Billie is equally multi-faceted, she believes that Dillinger will always come for her because he needs her to believe him, but she knows each time they say goodbye may be the last.

Cinematographer Dante Spinotti has collaborated with Michael Mann on five other films, but it is his work on LA Confidential that I was most reminded of here. The combination of Mann’s utter insistence on authenticity and physical locations, and the aesthetic powers of Spinotti create a sense of place and time that feels immediate, even as it is undeniably “˜then’. Public Enemies works, beyond the style and attention to detail, because it is intimate ““ these lives were important not because they are the stuff of legend but because they were lived. Once upon a time banks fell, businesses crumbled and a man stood up to say I’m not going to take this any more.

As the gang fall away one by one, ruined by the reckless glee of Baby Face Nelson (a magnificently manic Stephen Graham) and the dogged pursuit of Melvin Purvis, you fall in step with Dillinger. On his long walk towards the end you are at his side and you hope what must be will not be. When it comes it is a sucker punch that winds you and lingers.

“Die how you lived, all of a sudden.“

Manhattan Melodrama

Public Enemies is out on DVD in the UK today

Last night Leicester Square played host to the UK premiere of Michael Mann’s Public Enemies. This afternoon we were delighted to attend a screening and press conference for the film. We’ll post a full review later but, assuming this doesn’t class as a spoiler, what we can divulge is that the glowing reports you have heard this week are not wrong. In the meantime, with thanks to Way To Blue, we would like to share the highlights of today’s Q&A sessions with Marion Cotillard, Michael Mann and Johnny Depp.  The press conference, chaired by Radio 2′s Hilary Oliver, was in three separate sessions (a format we will reprise here).  It began with rising star, the beautiful Marion Cotillard (La Vie en Rose) who portrays hatcheck girl Billie Frechette ““ gangster John Dillinger’s true and loyal love. Cotillard speaks English as a second language and she shared the technical demands of vocalising Frechette. Indeed, in person, Marion’s accent is pronounced and charming, revealing the effort she must have put into her impressive performance.

Marion came to Public Enemies through the lure of Michael Mann who she “fell in love with” upon meeting. Likewise the script, having never heard of John Dillinger the story captured her, as did the role Billie played in his life. She met wives of imprisoned men as part of her preparation, to better understand their isolation and the instability of their lives.

At one point she became hypnotised by the whirring of the dozens of Dictaphones on the stage before her, giggling and asking “It’s funny non? It’s weird, it’s alive!”
When HeyUGuys asked her how she inhabits a character and found her voice for Billie Frechette she explained:

“Michael Mann is a perfectionist. An hour after screen test he give me a big box full of newspapers of that time, storybooks, photos”¦such a gift. You feed yourself and with all this information, you can be her. I need to meet someone in order to “˜be’ this person. I create their childhood. That is how I work”¦”

She spoke fondly of Mann saying: “I was touched by him, I so admired him and we had that”¦connection.” Although this was a huge production, she spoke of the intimacy of the work ““ that, when it comes down to it, on any film French, American, big or small the work is always intimate. When pushed on whether she shares Christian Bale’s, now infamous, method acting techniques she was deferential and generous saying:
“There’s an atmosphere on a set, something that stays with you”¦you keep it. Inbetween it is better to get there and stay there, not come out of it. Before La Vie en Rose I thought it was dangerous to do that or even ridiculous”¦I thought that because I didn’t know any better, now I understand more.”

[gplayer href="http://www.heyuguys.co.uk/audio/public_enemies/cottilard_heyuguys_edit.mp3"] Interview with Marion Cottilard: [/gplayer]

Michael Mann is a man who obviously loves John Dillinger. He has passion for someone “so current and contemporary for his time” that he studied evasive techniques, employed the latest automatic weaponry and drove the fastest cars to be the very best in the short span of his notorious final days. Who “exploded out of prison and for thirteen months burned white hot, with no concept of the future, no end game.” He was struck by the irony of Dillinger’s final act ““ watching a movie where Clark Gable was essentially playing him “Dillinger watching Gable being Dillinger”, but not recognising the warning it contained.

Chicago is the other star of Public Enemies and Mann’s background there drew him to the Dillinger story. He remembers driving with his Father as a young boy:

“He pointed out The Biograph and said to me “˜that’s where Dillinger was shot down’, I said “˜who’s Dillinger?’”

Of Bale, who was his first choice to play G-man Melvin Purvis, he says:

“(Purvis) was a member of the landed gentry”¦a rigid young man with a duelling ethic who breaks his own code. (Christian) just dives into the deep end of a character”¦he used to do the accent and drive his daughter mad, he’d say “˜you’d better get used to it I’ll be talking like this for months!’”

He is quick to defend Dillinger and put his life into context when an audience member asks if the image of him was at all glamorised:

“166 banks were in Chicago at that time, 140 of them failed. Employment was at 25%”¦The parts that are real, are magical ““ Johnny shocked awake by gunfire in the same room, looking at the same ceiling. Other parts”¦he took seventeen guards hostage with a wooden gun, we had to tone that down it was too unbelievable.”

Above all, I was impressed by Michael’s commitment to the story and to maintaining its integrity despite the legendary status of its hero. Of Dillinger perhaps the truest thing he said was:

“He didn’t conform to the criminal stereotype”¦and he played on that.”

[gplayer href="http://www.heyuguys.co.uk/audio/public_enemies/mann_heyuguys_edit.mp3"] Interview with Michael Mann: [/gplayer]

Johnny Depp’s first action, before taking his seat in front of the Public Enemies press conference, is a horrified double take at the poster behind him ““ at his own looming presence in particular:

“That’s a bit too large!”

In person, he is charismatic and charged with nervous energy. His voice by contrast is careful, considered and, like Mann, he is enthralled by Dillinger. He was first hooked, at the age of nine or ten, by the mythology of the man and the “twinkle of mischief in his eye”. He doesn’t understand the moniker Public Enemy Number One insisting “he was never an enemy of the public“.

For Depp the concept of “the guy who won’t take any more“ is fascinating. In Manhattan Melodrama, the film Dillinger was watching moments before his death, Clark Gable speaks these words: “Die how you lived, all of a sudden.”

It’s an idea Johnny Depp seems to relish. He speaks of Dillinger with reverence and, when asked which parts he has found hard to say goodbye to, he acknowledges that Dillinger numbers among them. He found Mann’s fastidious sense of place and time invaluable:

“Michael was a stickler for reality and I love him for that. To walk the walk, outside The Biograph, and fall where he fell”¦to the millimetre. You almost feel him arriving”¦without being moony or spooky”¦I felt his approval.”

He is generous in his praise of his co-stars and calls a jailhouse exchange with Christian Bale “”¦a great sparring match”. In Brit Stephen Graham, who plays Baby Face Nelson, he believes he has met:

“”¦one of my favourite actors of all time! I saw This is England”¦ took me to my knees”¦Magnificent. I was absolutely destroyed. I will force him to be in all my films ““ even at gunpoint!”

There were the token daft questions too which he parried with aplomb. When asked about the secret to his Peter Pan good looks he pointedly turned to the poster once more (the face of a man not some eternal boy) and answered:

“If you can avoid wine I’d do it. I would. Don’t smoke”¦stay in your room and watch reality TV.” (Fortunately for all present the woman who asked the Michael Jackson question was cut off in mid gush!)

In closing, I’d like to leave you with my favourite answer and the film he would choose to see on the day of his own death: “Withnail and I. Without a doubt, no question, Withnail and I.”

Ladies and gentlemen, Mr Johnny Depp!

[gplayer href="http://www.heyuguys.co.uk/audio/public_enemies/johnny depp press conference interview_edit.mp3"] Interview with Johnny Depp: [/gplayer]