Artificial Resuscitation

The project first surfaced some six years ago, when it was going to be the next Stanley Kubrick movie. Then the great man´s attention began to shift onto Eyes Wide Shut and it got pushed onto the back-burner - for reasons of which I am sure I don´t need to remind you of, definitively went out last year. The project in question - which I duly noted some time in 1995 - was a futuristic tale called A.I.

Kubrick had completed an 80-page treatment before he started on Eyes Wide Shut, and this was subsequently acquired by Steven Spielberg. Now Spielberg, like Kubrick, is not a film-maker to have just one project in development at any given time (well, I guess that´s true of any director: it´s just that, if you´re called Kubrick or Spielberg, people notice). In the latter´s case, there is Memoirs of a Geisha, once almost in pre-production but now on indefinite hold. There is Minority Report, with Tom Cruise, which is still apparently very much on the cards, although Spielberg and Cruise are waiting on a new script draft from Scott Frank. And there is the Charles Lindbergh biopic, which is reportedly at an advanced script stage.

All of which suggests the idea that the prolific producer/director would find time for A.I. - which stands, not for Artificial Insemination (the usual agricultural meaning of the acronym), but for Artificial Intelligence - seemed a little fanciful. But then, in mid-November, Spielberg was reported to be writing his own A.I. screenplay on the basis of Kubrick´s treatment. So, if something doesn´t quite pan out with Minority Report and if the Lindbergh biopic remains grounded and if there isn´t another Jurassic Park in the works, A.I. might just be the next Steven Spielberg movie. Or not... Read on.

...because he is recently reported to have acquired the screen rights to a first novel by a French architect called Marc Levy, which had yet to be published when we went to press (it is due out on January 27). Levy´s novel is said to be a love story with supernatural elements, somewhat in the vein of Ghost, and Spielberg picked it up during a bidding war at last autumn´s Frankfurt book fair. The French press has carried rumours of Tom Hanks and Gwyneth Paltrow already having been signed to star in the film version which, the same sources claim, Spielberg himself will direct. But the best part of the story is the novel´s title: Et si c´était vrai, which can be translated as ‘What If It Was True?'

Demme Tasks

Those Demmes are at it again. Decisively turning his back on all the debate about whether Jodie Foster will or will not play FBI agent Clarice Starling in the sequel to Silence of the Lambs (which brought him an Oscar, but which he emphatically doesn´t want to get involved with again), Jonathan Demme is going for an altogether softer option with a proposed remake of Stanley Donen´s elegant 1963 thriller, Charade.

The original (pictured above) featured Cary Grant helping Audrey Hepburn get her husband´s money back in Paris, while a trio of crooks (Walter Matthau, James Coburn, George Kennedy - those were the days) kept getting in the way.

The new version, which Demme is reported to be close to setting up at Universal, will star Will Smith and could be made just as soon as Smith finishes Robert Redford´s golf movie The Legend of Bagger Vance (with Matt Damon); the Muhammad Ali biopic at Sony; and the comedy I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry (it was called I Now Pronounce You Joe and Benny when I last mentioned it in July and, if you can figure out the implications of the name-change, then answers on a postcard, please), in which he is due to ‘marry´ fellow fireman Nic Cage. In other words, the Charade remake could roll some time this century.