It was reported last month that ahead of his Olympic duties next year Danny Boyle had signed on to direct on heist-gone-up-the-swanny thriller Trance with recent X-Men alumni James McAvoy and Michael Fassbender taking up leading roles. The film is a remake of Joe Ahearne’s 2001 TV movie starring Neil Pearson, Susannah Harker and Philip Davis about a robbery, a fortune and amnesia.

It appears that this casting isn’t to be as Twitch have provided an interesting update on the film, claiming that Fassbender is out of the project due to scheduling difficulties. Currently ensconced in Ridley Scott’s Prometheus as a golden blonde rent-boy of sorts (so he says, slight spoilers etc) the next film Fassbender has going on is Good Vibrations with Robert Sheenan and Steve Coogan, and it is either this film or his time with Scott that is preventing him joining Danny Boyle if the rumours is true.

Those sorry to wave goodbye to Mr Fassbender will have to console themselves with the potential casting of Colin Firth and Scarlett Johansson, Firth to replace Fassbender and Johansson to come on board in one of the relatively few female roles. Nothing is signed yet, no official confirmation but it’s a strong ensemble Boyle is bringing together.

Pathé have released a brand new French teaser trailer for The Skin I Live In.

Directed by Spanish visionary Pedro Almodóvar, The Skin I Live in stars Antonio Banderas, Elena Anaya, Marisa Paredes, Bárbara Lennie, Blanca Suárez and Fernando Cayo.

Ever since his wife was burned in a car crash, Dr. Robert Ledgard (Banderas), an eminent plastic surgeon, has been interested in creating a new skin with which he could have saved her. After twelve years, he manages to cultivate a skin that is a real shield against every assault.

In addition to years of study and experimentation, Robert needed a further three things: no scruples, an accomplice and a human guinea pig. Scruples were never a problem. Marilia, the woman who looked after him from the day he was born, is his most faithful accomplice. And as for the human guinea pig…

The trailer may not be any longer than the brief clip that was released before The Skin I Live In’s Cannes debut, but it does provide a savvy insight into what looks like a wildly fascinating, and darkly thrilling piece of cinema from a wildly celebrated director.

The Skin I Live In hits UK cinemas on August 26.

Check out the new French teaser trailer below:

Source: Twitch

Danny Boyle (Shallow Grave) has signed on to direct heist-thriller Trance.

Boyle will reunite with his 127 Hours and Slumdog Millionaire producer Christian Colson, and are in talks with Fox Searchlight and Pathé for finance and distribution.

The film is described as an art heist gone wrong, with the dark, sexy, hard-edged tone of previous Boyle films. It will shoot in September, before Boyle turns his attention to the London 2012 Summers Olympics opening ceremony

Trance is then expected to be released in March 2013.

Source: Deadline

20th Century Fox have announced that The Skin I Live In will be released in the UK on August 26, 2011.

Directed by Pedro Almodóvar (Volver, All About My Mother), The Skin I Live In stars Antonio Banderas, Elena Anaya, Marisa Paredes, Bárbara Lennie, Blanca Suárez and Fernando Cayo.

Ever since his wife was burned in a car crash, Dr. Robert Ledgard (Banderas), an eminent plastic surgeon, has been interested in creating a new skin with which he could have saved her. After twelve years, he manages to cultivate a skin that is a real shield against every assault.

In addition to years of study and experimentation, Robert needed a further three things: no scruples, an accomplice and a human guinea pig. Scruples were never a problem. Marilia, the woman who looked after him from the day he was born, is his most faithful accomplice. And as for the human guinea pig…

The Skin I Live In will premiere at the 64th annual Cannes Film Festival next month.

Official Press Release:

Acclaimed Spanish writer/director Pedro Almodóvar returns with his latest film The Skin I Live In, reuniting him with three of his previous collaborators: Antonio Banderas (Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, Tie Me Up, Tie Me Down), Elena Anaya (Talk to Her) and Marisa Paredes (All About My Mother, Talk to Her, The Flower of My Secret). The film is produced by Agustín Almodóvar (Broken Embraces, Bad Education) and features music by Alberto Iglesias (Broken Embraces, Volver). Twentieth Century Fox will release The Skin I Live In for Pathé in the UK on 26 August 2011, following its world premiere in competition at the 64th Cannes International Film Festival.

Guillermo Del Toro’s 3D stop-motion animated adaptation of the Carlo Colodi fairy tale Pinocchio will begin production later this year.

Gris Grimly will co-direct with Mark Gustafson, with The Jim Henson Company and Pathe funding the project.

The adaptation, based on a 2002 illustrated version, was hatched by Del Toro and Matthew Robbins, and is aimed at an older audience than the Disney version.

Del Toro said of his version:

“What we’re trying to do is present a Pinocchio that is more faithful to the take that Colodi wrote. That is more surreal and slightly darker than what we’ve seen before.”

Source: Deadline

Pathé Films have finally unveiled the UK trailer for their forthcoming romance-drama Last Night.

Directed by Massy Tadjedins, Last Night features performances from Keira Knightley, Eva Mendes, Sam Worthington, Guillaume Canet and Stephanie Romanov.

Last Night follows a married couple Joanna Reed (Knightley) and Michael Reed (Worthington), apart for a night while the husband takes a business trip with a colleague (Mendes) to whom he’s attracted. While he’s resisting his temptation, his wife encounters her past love (Canet).

Last Night is expected to be released sometime next year.

Watch the trailer below:

Leave it to the Daily Express to report a story about Princess Diana.

Last month we reported that a movie based on the Chilean mining disaster was going into production before the miners had even been saved. I, in a search for comparisons, enrolled the aid of 9/11 and Oliver Stone but was stopped short by the tragic death of Lady Diana. While each new film about a contemporary disaster seemed to be pushing the boundaries of taste in their immediacy, Princess Diana had been awarded considerable grace. I puzzled, does The Queen really constitute her definitive film adaptation. It appears not.

Lady Diana’s big screen homage is apparently like buses, you wait years for one to come along and then two arrive at once.

With Diana’s posthumous 50th Birthday and 30th Wedding Anniversary expected to draw innumerable tributes next July, the movies will likely be in production by the time commemorations reach fever pitch.

In development at Pathé and Renaissance Films, the two projects endeavour to homage the life and death of the Queen of Hearts and dramatise the allegations of Ken Wharfe’s controversial Diana: Closely Guarded Secret respectively. While Princes William and Harry have signed off on Pathé’s traditional biopic, their opinions regarding Renaissance Films’ more controversial project are not yet known.

The projects differ on more than just risk, however, with Pathé courting the likes of Kiera Knightly and - placards at the ready, Daily Express readers – Scarlett Johansson for the role of Diana and Helen Mirren for the role of her mother Frances Shand Kydd, while Renaissance Films are hoping to secure Charlize Theron and Ewan McGreggor. Producer Stephen Evans explained to the Daily Mail:

“We are intending to make the authentic movie of Diana by using the voices of the people who were there – and Ken Wharfe was right there at her side at the most significant part of her life.”

While I am indeed surprised that the perhaps more predictable names – Emily Blunt, Carey Mulligan or Gemma Arterton – aren’t being banded about, I am far more interested in who might play Prince Charles. Collider raises a good point:

“Ralph Fiennes is too grim, Clive Owen is too good-looking and Daniel Craig, too cool.”

I must say, Peter O’Toole has my vote.

When I was asked to cover The Descent: Part 2 for its world premiere, I joked to my fiancé that the eventual junket would be in a cave.  Oh how we laughed.  Three months later I opened an email inviting me on The Descent: Part 2 junket – it was to take place in a cave.

The title of this piece refers to the seven adults who spent a three hour journey to Somerset discreetly freaking out at the idea of climbing into very small, dark places on a gloomy autumn morning.  We were later joined by another journalist and our caving guide.  Fortunately for the sanity of all concerned only one of them was visibly concerned at the prospect of the small, dark and dangerous.

HeyUGuys may appear to the untrained eye to be a band of merry movie men but in fact some of us have never met.  I will never forget the day I met HUG Dave because it was the day I broke my very sensible never engage in activity that requires you to wear a boiler suit rule.  It was the day we went to Goatchurch Cavern…

Our guide, caving expert and jolly enthusiastic fellow, Andy Sparrow advised on the look and location of both the Descent films.  His expertise ensured the quality and authenticity that won the first film such praise.  Indeed he told us that only the most discerning eye could recognise the six girls as novice cavers.  During the drive up we had split into hushed huddles consoling each other that no one would take writers proper caving.  We would, we supposed, wander through echoing chambers looking at stalagmites and stalactites and trying to remember how to remember which was which.  We might be offered, as the email suggested, more adventurous fare if we were game but on the whole it would be a jolly old jolly before we retired to the pub.

I don’t think Andy got the email.

The woodland walk up to the mouth of the cave was brisk and steep ““ a clue that the lazy Londoners were in for a challenging afternoon!  We passed improbably small entrances to cave routes that Andy assured us were regularly used.  The angular twists of the contorted tunnels in The Descent: Part 2 leapt unbidden into my mind.  Dave skipped along oblivious, he hadn’t seen the film yet the poor unsuspecting fool.  Neither had most of the others ““ I had to warn them we were doomed!  *Breathe* my extra huge sweatshirt (all the better for cushioning my fall) was clearly restricting the airflow to my lungs as it crumpled inside my funky yet functional boiler suit.  I had to calm down.  We would be fine.  We were all adults and one of us knew where they were.  How bad could it be?

It was quite bad.

Don’t get me wrong I see now, in hindsight, that it was all it was great fun and it was a grand day out but I had recently seen The Descent: Part 2, the following night I was going to see it again.  I was a woman with Crawlers on my mind (and dying alone in the darkness).  Because we had already done the tourist bit you see, it was smallish and there were spiders but little in the way of Danger of Death.  Two caverns in, we ran out of smallish and smacked straight into very small!

One of the things The Descent: Part 2 does very well is to conjure the handicap a helmet gives you.  I smacked my head so often that day that I remember a constant staccato beat following me around like a tiny drummer boy.  Obviously it is good to have the helmet in place to protect your skull, beauty and brains but each time you strike your head the helmet slips and you lose your line of sight.  It is truly disorientating – sound pinballs underground and without your vision you are utterly lost.  The hysteria Rios feels trapped in a flooded cavern came alive for me as I struggled to keep my head upright in a tight passage and wriggle myself free before I lost sight of the man in front.  The sense of powerlessness is overwhelming.

I had never understood that caving was so three-dimensional.  At times the boulders we lily-padded across came to sharp non-negotiable points at others they dropped swiftly away to nothing.  The physical demands of the actors roles were bashed, bumped and bruised home to us all as elbows, knees and ribs held our tumbling weight.  The need for teamwork was paramount and it was a comfort to have Dave’s enthusiastic grin beaming in my wake or a fellow writer’s foot blocking my fall.  Messing around under the ground seems the quickest possible way to bond with a total stranger.  Management training types should pick up on the benefits ““ and if they don’t all make it back well…win-win.

At the deepest point of our own descent Andy had us turn out our headlights (?) and only then did it really hit home that we were at the mercy of the cave.  It was pitch black.  That phrase is often misused, so to clarify it was a deep visceral enveloping blackness that obscured everything. Though he had been a funny and cheeky guide ““ coaxing us into ever tighter spots and climbs with teasing encouragement – Andy was deadly serious when he told us that every hour of progress you make into a cave adds ten hours to your rescue time.  One of the regular routes he visits takes twelve hours to navigate.  That is a hundred and twenty hour rescue.  Gulp.

The climb out was harder, all of us more serious and determined.  We had each pushed ourselves further than we intended and the overall mood was one of pride and shell shock.  We were tired, bruised and a little sobered I think.  We achieved a great deal on our Grand Day out in Burrington Combe.  One of the “˜squeezes’, The Superman, was a Cirque Du Soleil feat of mind over matter – of “should my knees really bend back that way?“  We did things that English people rarely do sober ““ we encouraged one another.  It was all very satisfying and totally exhausting.

The following evening I bravely attended the multimedia screening of The Descent: Part 2. Another caver was there representing Freud and we exchanged knowing smiles.  “How were you this morning?” she asked “couldn’t raise my arms to wash my hair without weeping” I replied.  “I know what you mean” she said, my fellow survivor.

The Descent Cavers

With huge thanks to Pathe for funding the event and to Tanya at Freud & Charlotte at Substance for organising.

Watch an exclusive clip here and read our review here

You can also see a video taking by the guys over at SciFi.co.uk from the day too here.

The Descent Part 2 has been described as ‘The Feel Sh*t Scared Film of the Decade‘ for a reason and when you see this clip you might start to understand why!

Pathé / Warner Bros Pictures UK have been kind enough to give us an exclusive clip for their latest movie, The Descent Part 2 which is released in cinemas December 4th (with previews on the 2nd & 3rd December). As you’ll see from the clip below, the movie takes you back underground where monsters can be lurking and where the most claustrophobic movie of all time is back for another round!

Synopsis: Shauna Macdonald (Mutant Chronicles, The Descent) returns as Sarah, continuing the story of 2005′s hugely successful horror thriller The Descent, in which a group of young women disappear during a caving trip in the Appalachian Mountains.

Emerging from the cave system alone, distraught and covered in the blood of her missing companions, Sarah is incoherent and half-wild with fear. Sceptical about her account of events and convinced Sarah’s psychosis hides far darker secrets, Sheriff Vaines (Gavan O’Herlihy) doesn’t waste time. Along with his partner Rios (Krysten Cummings), and their cave rescue team Dan (Douglas Hodge), Greg (Joshua Dallas), and Cath (Anna Skellern), Vaines forces Sarah back into the caves to help the rescuers find her friends.

Alongside Macdonald, The Descent: Part 2 also features Natalie Mendoza reprising her role as Juno.  Krysten Cummings, Anna Skellern, Gavan O’Herlihy (Seven Days of Grace), Joshua Dallas (Ghost Machine, “Doctor Who”) and Douglas Hodge (Mansfield Park) also star.

The Descent: Part 2 is written by James McCarthy, J. Blakeson and James Watkins (Eden Lake). The film is produced by Academy Award® winner Christian Colson (Slumdog Millionaire) and Ivana Mackinnon (The Scouting Book for Boys). Neil Marshall who directed the original film serves as executive producer with Paul Smith (The Descent, Slumdog Millionaire).  Previously a well-known editor on films including Kick-Ass, Eden Lake, Stardust and Layer Cake, as well as The Descent; Jon Harris makes his debut as director.

You can find out more about the movie on the official Descent Part two website: http://www.thedescent2.co.uk/

You can buy The Descent (Part I) on DVD and Blu Ray if you either need a catch up or want to watch the original before heading to the cinema. Next week, HeyUGuys blogger, Em will be bringing you her review of the movie plus interviews with director, Jon Harris and you can also find out what happens when HeyUGuys takes a trip caving with Pathé and some other unsuspecting movie journalists!

© 2009 Pathé