Charlotte Gainsbourg and Willem Dafoe played a crazily estranged couple in Lars von Trier’s erotic/thriller/surreal Antichrist in 2009. And now, Dafoe is set to return to Von Trier’s latest, Nymphomaniac along with Gainsbourg, Shia LaBeouf, Christian Slater, Stellan Skarsgard and Uma Thurman. Others are joining the cast, while one big name has pulled out.
Nicole Kidman had been rumored as another possible addition to the cast, but she has more regal obligations and cannot join, according to THR. Kidman, who played the lead role in von Trier’s Dogville is currently busy playing Grace Kelly in Olivier Dahan’s Grace of Monaco.
Dafoe, meanwhile, will play a supporting role in the two-part erotic Nymphomaniac, which will be released in both a hardcore and soft core version. Dafoe is currently in Hamburg, starring in Anton Corbijn’s drama A Most Wanted Man.
Von Trier veteran Udo Kier, who has taken part in a number of von Trier’s films including his most recent Melancholia has also joined the cast along with French actor Jean-Marc Barr (Dogville), Caroline Goodall (Schindler’s List), Kate Ashfield (Shaun of the Dead), Saskia Reeves (Butterfly Kiss) and Danish actor Omar Shargawi (R).
In the film, Gainsbourg stars as Jo, a self-described nymphomaniac who reveals her story to an older bachelor played by Stellan Skarsgard.
Rumors have flown over the summer whether named actors would take part in sexually explicit scenes, though porn-star “stand-ins” have also been rumored to be engaged on camera. Shia LaBeouf fueled the rumor when he said he was ready to “go all the way” in Nymphomaniac.
[Source: THR]
Willem Dafoe (57)
Selena Gomez (20)
A.J. Cook (34)
Franka Potente (38)
Rufus Wainwright (39)
Rhys Ifans (45)
Irene Bedard (45)
David Spade (48)
John Leguizamo (48)
Joanna Going (49)
Rob Estes (49)
Keith Sweat (51)
Alan Menken (63)
Albert Brooks (65)
Don Henley (65)
Danny Glover (66)
George Clinton (71)
Alex Trebek (72)
Terence Stamp (74)
Louise Fletcher (78)
Oscar de la Renta (80)
Also in Tuesday afternoon’s news round-up, Participant Media picks up Mexican actor/filmmaker Diego Luna’s latest project starring Michael Peña and America Ferrera, Relativity scores Alberto Iglesias for its latest project, indie thriller Backgammon gets rolling, meeting young Hollywood’s “It-Photographer” and Moscow’s Bolshoi to hit U.S. theaters.
Participant Takes Rights to Diego Luna’s Chavez
Participant Media has taken North American rights to the film which stars Crash actor Michael Peña as the famed California labor organizer Cesar Chavez. Currently filming in Sonora, Mexico, the film also stars America Ferrera, Rosario Dawson and Wes Bentley in a script by Hotel Rwanda writer Keir Pearson. The story revolves around “Chavez’s fearless determination in organizing the largest non-violent protest in U.S. history to accomplish his ultimate goal of obtaining basic human rights for over 50,000 farm workers in California.”
Relativity Taps Alberto Iglesias to Score Scott Cooper’s Out of the Furnace
The three-time Oscar®-nominated composer Alberto Iglesias (Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy) to score the gritty drama currently-titled Out of the Furnace, written and directed Scott Cooper (Crazy Heart). The film stars Christian Bale, Woody Harrelson, Casey Affleck, Forest Whitaker, Willem Dafoe and Sam Shepard.
Indie Thriller Backgammon Begins Shoot
3:1 Cinema and Fischer Productions have begun production on the project, based on the cult novel Bloody Baudelaire by R.B. Russell. Directed by Francisco Orvañanos stars group of up-and-comers including Noah Silver (The Borgias), Brittany Allen (The Rocker) Alex Beh (Sugar), Olivia Crocicchia (Terri) and Christian Alexander (The Lying Game).
Around the ‘net…
Jon Favreau May Be Heading to Jersey Boys
The Iron Man director is apparently the frontrunner to direct GK Films’ Jersey Boys, Graham King’s feature adaptation of the Broadway musical “Jersey Boys: The Story of Frankie Valli & The Four Seasons.” The story revolves around Valli and the other members…
Welcome to Biz Break, Movieline’s inaugural roundup of film news that comes our way and other highlights from publications worldwide. Among today’s stories: Harvey Weinstein will celebrate his Legion of Honor award in New York, Willem Dafoe lands a role in an upcoming thriller, Ridley Scott gets a career retrospective, and more…
Movieline Tidbits
Harvey to Party for Légion d’Honneur Award in NYC
Last month, French president Nicolas Sarkozy bestowed France’s Légion d’Honneur award on TWC’s Harvey Weinstein. The celebration continues next week in NYC: Friends and family of Weinstein will join together at the French Embassy of the United States in New York City on Monday, April 30 to celebrate at a reception hosted by the French embassy. At the reception, a “special guest” will read a letter from President Sarkozy to Weinstein before the crowd. Prior to the reception at the French Embassy, there will be a private screening of The Intouchables at the Paley Center for Media’s Bennack Theatre. The film will be released in the U.S. May 25th.
Dafoe to Join Thriller Out of the Furnace
Relativity Media has closed a deal with two-time Oscar-nominee Willem Dafoe to join the cast of its gritty dramatic thriller currently titled Out of the Furnace. Dafoe who will play John Petty, joins the previously announced award-winning cast including Oscar-winner Christian Bale, Oscar-nominated Casey Affleck, Zoe Saldana (Avatar), Oscar-nominated Sam Shepard (The Right Stuff), Oscar-nominated Woody Harrelson and Oscar-winner Forest Whitaker. The film, which started shooting on April 13th on location in Braddock, Pennsylvania, is written and directed by Scott Cooper (Crazy Heart).
Film Society Readies Ridley Scott Retrospective
The Film Society of Lincoln Center will host a complete retrospective of three-time Oscar-nominee Ridley Scott, whose career began in the 70s. The retrospective…
Man vs. beast, man vs. man, man vs. corporation, man vs. himself — The Hunter takes all these pretty ladies out for a spin, but can’t seem to decide which one to bring home. The set-up is so swift it could easily pass you by: Martin (Willem Dafoe) is contracted by a shady outfit to bag a Tasmanian tiger, presumed extinct, in the Australian wilderness. Rumor has it there’s one left out there, and what better reason to fully extinguish a species than in the name of pharmaceutical patent? Martin appears to have no particular feeling about this assignment; as long as his toiletries are properly lined up and he’s left alone, he doesn’t appear to have a particular feeling about much of anything.
Martin’s inscrutability is both a key element of all the above-listed plotlines and the reason no one of them is fully realized. Billeted in a remote Tasmanian home with two young children who have a missing father and a grieving mother (Frances O’Connor) who dopes herself through the days, Dafoe’s character is prepped for a transfusion of warmer, more human blood early on. Sass (Morgana Davies) is the big sister with the foul mouth and matter of fact attitude, Bike (Finn Woodlock) is the mystical mute little brother who draws pictures of Tasmanian tigers (a striking mix of jungle cat and mountain wolf) and seems to know more about his father’s whereabouts than he lets on. Both are utterly irresistible, and with their mother MIA they launch a full charm offensive, even jumping in the tub with Martin after he finally gets a broken generator — and some hot water — flowing again.
Scene by scene The Hunter, adapted from a novel by Julia Leigh, holds your attention like a pair of big, inquisitive…
Full Story »I met Abel Ferrara in a café on Mulberry Street. In an hour’s time, he didn’t once take his seat. The filmmaker makes a couple of phone calls, goes to the bathroom twice, shows me the new Web series that he’s developing with Vice TV on, and points me to two different articles about his movies. Unkempt and energetic, the Bronx-born director of such New York notorieties as Ms. 45, King of New York, Bad Lieutenant, The Funeral and this week’s 4:44 Last Day on Earth is exactly what you’d imagine he’d be like if he were one of his movie’s characters.
In a way, he is. 4:44 features Willem Dafoe and Shanyn Leigh as a couple spending their last hours together before the world ends. They’re each in their own separate but related worlds: she paints and listens to Buddhist philosophy while he talks to friends via Skype and decides if he should end two years of sobriety by getting high one last time. The loose nature of 4:44’s scenario speaks to the Cassavetes-inspired, improv-oriented nature of Ferrara’s dramas, which are often collaborative processes between actor and filmmaker. This is especially characteristic of Ferrara’s working relationship with Dafoe. “If Willem wasn’t going to play it,” Ferrara told me, “I don’t think I would have wrote the script.”
The film marks Ferrara and Dafoe’s third film together, coming after 1998’s New Rose Hotel and the 2007 ensemble piece Go Go Tales (which itself almost became a series on HBO). But more importantly, 4:44 further refines a working relationship that involves Dafoe co-creating not only his character, but also the scenes that, as Ferrara tells it, the actor is “comfortable with, that he believes in, that he understands.”
“[We have] confidence with each other…
Full Story »If you happen to live in a neighborhood with no Jehovah’s Witness ladies around to remind you that we’re living in the last days, wackadoodle director Abel Ferrara’s latest, 4:44 Last Day on Earth, is here to drive that truth home — or at least make you think about it just a little bit. Willem Dafoe plays an actor, Cisco, facing what he, and everybody else, knows is the Earth’s last day, thanks to an ozone layer that dissolved faster than anyone expected. He spends that last day writing in his journal, watching video footage of some fake-inspirational guru-dude, reaching out to his daughter and assorted pals via Skype and, most importantly, making sweet, crazy, soft-core love to his dishy, much-younger girlfriend, painter Skye (Shanyn Leigh), in the couple’s artsy, faux-ramshackle Manhattan loft. What a way to go!
And yet, for an Abel Ferrara movie at least, 4:44 Last Day on Earth is surprisingly restrained. It doesn’t have the loosey-goosey dress-up-box vibe of the director’s 2007 Go Go Tales (also starring Dafoe), or the lackadaisical silliness of his 2005 Blessed Virgin thriller Mary (which featured a post-Big Fish, pre-La Vie en Rose Marion Cotillard, though I don’t remember a thing about her performance). 4:44 is, like the aforementioned movies, often laughable — watching the excessively craggy Dafoe and the excessively nubile Leigh roll around on their pre-Apocalyptic mattress was certainly good for a giggle. But the picture is also weirdly compelling, maybe most notably for the way Dafoe’s character — who is, in this respect, perhaps a stand-in for the Bronx-born Ferrara — seems to be grappling less with the idea that the world is ending than that the city is ending.
Ferrara integrates lots of — perhaps too much — found TV footage of people around the…
Full Story »There was no shortage of stars coming through SXSW 2012, debuting films and projects as diverse as Joss Whedon’s Cabin in the Woods to Lena Dunham’s HBO series GIRLS. Take a look and see who else dropped in on Austin, Texas for the annual film festival, including: Channing Tatum, Jonah Hill, and their 21 Jump Street crew, Willem Dafoe, Al Gore, Johnny Knoxville, Melissa Leo, Matthew McConaughey, Jack Black, Aubrey Plaza, Gabrielle Union, Bobcat Goldthwait, new director (!) Matthew Lillard, two Broken Lizards, model-turned-actress Dree Hemingway, and more.
Click to launch the SXSW ‘12 gallery!
Movieline is pleased to introduce Inessential Essentials, a regular feature about some of the most intriguing — if not necessarily most obvious — new home-viewing options on the market. We begin today with a film practically doomed by controversy a quarter-century ago, resurrected for DVD and finally given the treatment it truly deserves this week on Blu-ray. — Ed.
What’s the Film: The Last Temptation of Christ (1988), new on Blu-ray via Criterion Collection
Why it’s an Inessential Essential: Adapted from Nikos Kazantzakis’s novel by the same, The Last Temptation of Christ is a moving and heart-felt testament of religious faith. It’s also probably not the first film you’d think of when you think of when you think of Martin Scorsese’s filmography. Temptation follows Jesus of Nazareth (Willem Dafoe) in his long journey from looking at God’s presence as “the ultimate headache,” to quote Temptation screenwriter Paul Schrader, towards seeing death in the service of God as an act of divine mercy.
The Last Temptation of Christ isn’t the only film of Scorsese’s to focus on a troubled protagonist’s spiritual crisis. Like several of Scorsese’s protagonists, Jesus gradually comes to understand the difference between how he can behave and how he should behave according to his moral principles. He’s a man first, and only by film’s end does he really become the messiah, too.
Still, because of its sexual implications, the film was a source of major controversy when it was released in 1988 and even before then when Scorsese originally tried unsuccessfully to make The Last Temptation of Christ with Paramount Studios in 1983 on a considerably bigger budget. According to David Ehrenstein’s liner notes, Scorsese was told he could make the picture with a budget of $15-20 million. But then a…
Full Story »SXSW routinely boasts the most varied and neverending film line-up of the year, and the just-announced 2012 behemoth of a roster is no exception. So let’s make it a wee bit easier to take in, shall we? After the jump find the buzzworthiest titles among the 100+ features and documentaries debuting this March in Austin, from major upcoming studio peeks (21 Jump Street) to docs (a new Jessica Yu!) and much smaller (but potentially completely awesome) fare.
21 Jump Street
Last year’s big mainstream discovery at SXSW was Bridesmaids; this year it’s Sony taking the gamble with a headlining sneak peek at their cop reboot, which stars Jonah Hill and Channing Tatum as undercover officers.
The Cabin in the Woods
The Joss Whedon-produced, Drew Goddard-directed horror pic has been delayed for so long, and yet earned such praise out of Butt-Numb-A-Thon. The biggest curiosity of the fest, perhaps, if only to finally learn what the deal is with this thing.
The Hunter
Willem Dafoe as a mercenary + Julia Leigh novel + brooding character pic + strong reviews out of Toronto = a must see.
frankie go boom
Jordan Roberts’ entry, which stars Charlie Hunnam, Chris O’Dowd, Lizzy Caplan, Ron Perlman, and Chris Noth, had me at its synopsis: “a flick by bruce about his little brother frank who’s a crybaby fuck who shouldn’t do lame-ass embarrassing shit if he dozn’t want people 2 see it.”
Small Apartments
The latest from Jonas Akerlund — music video veteran, director of Spun, and the dude who made that Lady Gaga/Beyonce “Telephone” opus — gets its world premiere at SXSW.
Sun Don’t Shine
Indie darling Amy Seimetz makes her feature directorial debut in this tale of a Florida couple on the road doing “very…
