In the Works: Peele, Haddish, and More

Get Out director Jordan Peele tells the Hollywood Reporter’s Stephen Galloway that he’s currently writing and plans to direct his next film later this year. “One thing I know is that this is genre; and playing around with the thriller, horror, action, fun genre of intrigue is my favorite. That’s my sweet spot. So I think tonally it should resemble Get Out. That said, I want to make a completely different movie. I want to address something different than race in the next one.”

On a related note, Peele has overseen “Noir Town,” a set of fashion photos for W Magazine starring Janelle Monåe. “I wanted to create a Hitchcock moment that doesn’t really exist in a Hitchcock film,” Peele tells Lynn Hirschberg. The result is one of three spreads flagged on three separate covers for the new issue; the other two are directed by Greta Gerwig and Luca Guadagnino.

Feng Xiaogang (Youth) is planning to shoot Cell Phone 2 this year. As Patrick Frater reports for Variety, it’ll be “a follow-up to his 2003 hit Cell Phone, which was a wry social comedy in which the extramarital affair of a media executive is exposed by his careless use of modern technology.”

We’ve already noted here that Agnieszka Holland will begin shooting Gareth Jones next month, a drama about “a Welsh journalist who first publicized in the Western world the existence of the Soviet famine of 1932–1933,” as Katarzyna Grynienko reports for Film New Europe. Now Denisa Strbova reports, also at FNE, that Holland will follow up on that feature immediately with Charlatan, “based on real events and inspired by Jan Mikolášek, a healer with exceptional abilities, who lived in Czechoslovakia in the 1950s.”

Asked about the next James Bond movie on BBC Radio 4's Desert Island Discs, Christopher Nolan said, “I won’t be the man,” reports Sarah James at Digital Spy. “No, categorically.”

Jessica Chastain is “in negotiations” to play “the adult version of Beverly” in Andy Muschietti’s sequel to It, slated for release on September 6, 2019, reports Variety’s Justin Kroll.

Also, Jim Mickle (Cold in July) will direct Boyd Holbrook (Narcos) in In the Shadow of the Moon. The screenplay by Gregory Weidman and Geoff Tock “is such a great mind bender and beautifully weaves together all my favorite genres,” says Mickle.

And Olivia Wilde will make her directorial debut with Booksmart. Kaitlyn Dever and Beanie Feldstein will play “two academic superstars and best friends” who, “on the eve of their high school graduation,” suddenly “realize that they should have worked less and played more. Determined never to fall short of their peers, the girls set out on a mission to cram four years of fun into one night.”

Kroll also reports that Viola Davis will star in Amazon’s Troupe Zero. “Plot details are being kept under wraps.” At the Playlist in the meantime, Jordan Ruimy reports on comments Davis made at a recent conference: “People say, ‘You’re a black Meryl Streep. You are. And we love you. We love you. There is no one like you.’ Okay, then, if there’s no one like me, if you think I’m that, you pay me what I’m worth. You give me what I’m worth.”

Series

“Netflix is expanding its animation slate with a ten-episode series order to Tuca & Bertie, from the team behind Bojack Horseman, with Girls Trip star Tiffany Haddish on board to voice the lead character and executive produce,” report Deadline’s Nellie Andreeva and Denise Petski. This will be “a comedy about the friendship between two thirty-year-old bird women who live in the same apartment building: Tuca, a cocky, care-free toucan (Haddish), and Bertie, an anxious, daydreaming songbird.”

Robert Towne, the renowned screenwriter behind Chinatown (1974), has written an adaptation of James Crumley’s 1983 novel Dancing Bear that he and producer Mike Medavoy have been aiming to turn into a feature. Now Towne’s rewritten it as an hour-long pilot for USA Network, reports Deadline’s Mike Fleming Jr. Mel Gibson, who’s all set to direct, tells him: “It’s basically Chinatown set in a 7-11 in Montana in the ’70s with a whole lot of cocaine.”

Collider’s Dave Trumbore has got Alex Garland (Ex Machina,Annihilation) talking about his forthcoming series for FX, Devs. “It’s about a particular aspect of technology at the moment which is to do with very, very big data and very powerful processing power, and what can happen when you put those two things together. It’s set in San Francisco, a sort of tech story.” He hopes to start shooting “in about six months.”

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