Picking up where we left off in my last update on German films in production half a year ago, here’s the latest in WWW (
Wim Wenders Watch): “Every Thing Will Be Fine”, starring the dream team of James Franco, Charlotte Gainsbourg and Rachel McAdams, is slated for a 2014 release … as a TIFF world premiere perhaps? The Globe and Mail quoted Franco as describing the 5-years-in-the-making, Scandinavia-set, Quebec-shot 3D feature as a “very slow drama”. The film's producer announced that their groundbreaking 3D experience with "Pina" now gives Wenders the chance to concentrate more on the emotional power of the format.
Wenders‘ other recent endeavours were less paced: He spent November on the Spanish island of Mallorca to shoot a commercial (not his first, he has previously directed pasta and
ice cream spots). He is still in Canada but apparently not going back to his homebase Berlin afterwards but rather moving to his home region, to Düsseldorf, the city which will host the new Wenders Foundation and archive. And his young music label Wenders Music just released the latest CD by relatively unknown Berlin band "
Infamis“.
WHW (Werner Herzog Watch) is further out, time-wise. His forever project,
the Gertrude Bell biopic “Queen of the Dessert“ written and directed by him and also starring Franco, plus Nicole Kidman as Bell and Robert Pattinson as T.E. Lawrence, filling the big shoes of the late Peter O’Toole, will hit theatres not before 2015. It is said to start shooting as we speak in Germany, Morocco and Jordan.
On to Tom & Tom,
Tykwer is again directing Hanks, in the drama “A Hologram for the King” after Dave Eggers. “The story involves a struggling businessman who, after failing in America, heads to a rising Saudi Arabian city for a last ditch attempt to stave off foreclosure, pay his daughter´s college tuition, and do something memorable,” says Deadline. Meanwhile Tykwer is keeping busy writing a
12-part German TV series called “Babylon Berlin“, his first, adapting Volker Kutscher´s best-selling crime novels about a police detective in 1920s Berlin, said to be aimed at the international market, so I hope we’ll see it on the big or small screen here as well.
More great and quite diverse news from
Christoph Waltz...
The Terry Gilliam-directed sci-fi fantasy drama "The Zero Theorem“ has just hit theatres. "A computer hacker´s goal to discover the reason for human existence continually finds his work interrupted thanks to the Management; this time, they send a teenager and lusty love interest to distract him," read the promo. Matt Damon co-stars. In an Indie Wire interview, Gilliam said that "we shot very fast. The idea of doing this film probably began in July last year, though it was a script that had been around for 5 years. I had no work, everything had collapsed, so
when we got Christoph [Waltz] that was the moment when we knew the film would get made, and we started shooting October 5. Don’t think, just do." Fantastic(al) Waltz scene
here, as well as hilarious
trailer. I need to see this asap.
You will have to wait nearly a year to laugh about or at "Horrible Bosses 2“, in which Waltz plays Chris Pine's father. Jennifer Aniston co-stars alongside returning cast members Jason Bateman, Charlie Day and Jason Sudeikis. Waltz too has to pay the rent.
Most recently in Antwerp, where opera fan Waltz just gave his musical debut, directing Richard Strauss’ “
Rosenkavalier”.
From comedy back to villain, this one I can’t wait for. David Yates (“Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows”) directs "Tarzan“: "Waltz will play a Belgian soldier named Captain Rom who attempts to capture Tarzan in exchange for a ransom in diamonds,“ The Hollywood Reporter revealed. Emma Stone is Jane. The film starts shooting this summer.
More artists with multiple irons in the fire include Ronald Zehrfeld of “Barbara” fame. The hit film’s director
Christian Petzold recast both Zehrfeld and Nina Hoss as a couple in “Phoenix”, set in West Germany after the war. Hoss plays a Holocaust survivor who was assumed dead but returns home under a new identity to find out whether her husband betrayed her. But first, we'll see Zehrfeld on the red carpet at Potsdamer Platz in the Berlinale Competition with Dominik Graf's "Die Geliebten Schwestern".
Watch Zehrfeld again in 2014 in
“Später im Sommer”, German Film Award winner Feo Aladag’s follow-up to her brilliant Oscar entry “When We Leave”, which again she wrote, produced and directed. Zehrfeld plays a German soldier in Afghanistan in the German-Paschtu-Dari-English language film that tells the story of the unusual friendship between him and an Afghan translator.
Coming up next week in the second part of our in-production report: News from acclaimed directors FATIH AKIN, ANDREAS DRESEN, CHRIS KRAUS, CHRISTOPH HOCHHÄUSLER and CHRISTIAN SCHWOCHOW.
by Jutta Brendemühl
