Henry Bromell has only directed one theatrical film: 2000’s Panic starring William H. Macy, John Ritter, Neve Campbell and Donald Sutherland.

In this New York Times article to promote that film, Bromell makes this remark in regards to Sutherland:-

”We were getting ready to do one of Donald’s big scenes, ‘and Donald says, ‘You don’t like to give much direction, do you, Henry?’ Then he paused for a second, and then - knowing that Fellini is my hero - he said, ‘Neither did Fellini.’ ”

Bromell will get a chance to immortalise his hero on celluloid as he is set to direct Fellini Black and White, a biopic of the famous Italian director that focuses on his “bizarre yet heartfelt romp” in Los-Angeles before the 1957 Academy Awards.

Who will play this Italian filmmaking icon? None other than Spain’s Antonio Banderas. There is practically no resemblance between the pair but I doubt it matters. Fellini is an incredibly famous director but unlike, say, Alfred Hithcock, people don’t really know what he looks like. Hitch strikes up an immediate visual for many but does the same apply for Fellini?

Bromell, who also wrote the script for the film, is well known for his TV work with Brotherhood and Carnivale but that hasn’t hindered him in assembling a top notch cast. Joining Banderas in the film are Emily Watson, Liv Tyler, Laurence Fishburne and Peter Dinklage.

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Halloween is upon us and with that in mind OWF can bring you info on an upcoming splatter sequel.

Horror auteur George Romero’s next movie is a go and it’ll be Diary of the Dead 2. Romero will shoot the film in March of next year.

Diary of the Dead hasn’t even been released yet, though The Weinstein Company picked up the US and worldwide distribution rights at the Toronto Film Festival so expect to see it fairly soon.

Reviews for the film have been decidedly mixed, so hopefully there’s something in Diary worth making a sequel for other than the fact it’d be a fast and cheap shoot and would turn a profit quickly.

Stay tuned to OWF as we’ll be bringing you several more big exclusives today and tomorrow.

Wolverine starts shooting next month and as far as I know Hugh Jackman is the only confirmed cast member (though Brian Cox is listed as rumoured on IMDB).

Fox are obviously going to have to do something about that because, as much as I would love to watch 120 minutes of solo Jackman, he could really do with someone to play off against in this film!

In charge of the search for co-stars is Christine King (Fool’s Gold, Revenge of the Sith) who has been hired as casting director for the movie. I suspect it has been left so late because the studio were waiting on Skip Woods’ rewrite. Opinion on the earlier script was universal: it stank. Hopefully Woods has been able to pull something decent together.

As for Wolverine’s duds, X-Men Films has found out that Kym Barrett (The Matrix, Speed Racer) will be designing them.

Meanwhile, over on George Miller’s Justice League, we can report that the bulk of filming will take place at Fox Studios in Sydney and will involve extensive green screen work.

As for crew members, Miller has added another Oscar winner to his team in the form of director of photography Dean Semler. Art direction comes from Hugh Bateup and Damien Drew, both veterans of The Matrix franchise and Superman Returns.

P.J. Voeten, who has worked with Miller on Happy Feet and Babe will join the production as first assistant director when he finishes work on The Mummy 3 in Canada.

Now for something that’s sure to get fanboys salivating - WETA will be creating the costumes for the Justice League heroes! They may even be handling visual effects as well, though that news isn’t confirmed yet.

It’s worth noting that films on this scale will often take on several effects houses to manage the workload, so WETA are likely to be involved in some form.

Every few years we get a new screenwriting superstar: Joe Eszterhas… Shane Black… Charlie Kaufman. All three started out as “pure” screenwriters (by that I mean they wrote without producing/directing, though Black and Kaufman have now both moved behind the camera) and another was Andrew Kevin Walker.

Walker was hot stuff after SE7EN but, THE WOLF MAN aside, he seems to have been pretty quiet in recent years. In fact, he’s so low-key I couldn’t find a pic of him and had to plump for a one that tenuously links to my dreadful headline! And if you don’t know who that guy pictured is go and get Jonathan Demme’s STOP MAKING SENSE.

Barely a week ago, Walker’s new spec script hit Hollywood. Titled PSYCHO KILLER, it could quite possibly be the most dark and disturbing movie yet from the warped mind that brought us Gwyneth Paltrow’s severed head in a box.

A source of mine spilled the details on Walker’s script and if it gets made it won’t be for the squeamish.

The script has a parental advisory logo and notifies the reader that it should not be read by anyone under the age of 18. It deals with a insane killer who bludgeons his victims to death with a sledgehammer.

Here’s an interesting little clip from the text:-

“’We’ will mostly be shot from behind, or from the neck down, because our FACE WILL NEVER BE FULLY REVEALED. ‘We’ are PSYCHO KILLER.”

This is extremely daring on Walker’s part. The movie’s protagonist is going to be a serial killer - imagine if we saw SE7EN entirely from Kevin Spacey’s character’s point of view. I can see this being an extremely difficult watch but gripping nonetheless.

And what about the ending? Walker’s trademark is the shock ending, the sucker punch that yanks the rug from under the audience’s feet… surely they’ll be something special in store for the audience in PSYCHO KILLER’s third act.

Yesterday news broke on forward momentum for the long gestating Joe Carnahan project KILLING PABLO.

I won’t bother giving you a blow by blow of the film because it’s be easier if you just click here.

Anyways, a source who works in the industry dropped us a line telling us who else is attached to star in the movie with Christian Bale and Javier Bardem.

None other than Wolfman himself Benicio Del Toro is among the already impressive cast!

I don’t have confirmation on the role Benicio is playing but a bit of research into Mark Bowden’s book points strongly towards Hugo Martinez. Martinez was a Colombian Colonel who was involved in taking down drug lord Pablo Escobar.

Martinez is introduced thusly in the script:-

“WE FIND COLONEL HUGO MARTINEZ, late 40’s. A Man possessed of a warrior’s gird and a survivor’s pedigree.”

I’m liking this cast a lot, Carnahan has assembled some macho guys who would be totally believable inhabiting this world.

KILLING PABLO will definitely be on the OWF radar.

Thank heavens the JUSTICE LEAGUE movie is going forward. With the impending strike I’d feared that movie news might get a bit thin on the ground - it turns out there’s about three stories a day on this film!

George Miller’s superhero ensemble is without doubt the most highly anticipated film since whatever the last one was (TRANSFORMERS?), earlier today Matt posted about Jessical Biel playing Wonder Woman (I don’t hate the idea as much as some, but she seems too much of an obvious choice), now Patrick Sauriol (who previously ran the legendary Coming Attractions site) has unearthed some juicy JUSTICE LEAGUE details and posted them on his Back Room Chatter blog.

Here are some of the milder spoilers:

The characters of Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, Green Lantern, The Flash and Martian Manhunter comprise the League. One name that I did not hear mentioned was that of Aquaman. Where’d the fish guy go? Good question.

Story elements from the screenplay have been adapted directly from DC’s JLA comic book series.

The man wearing the Green Lantern ring in the JLA film is John Stewart and not Hal Jordan (Earth’s first Green Lantern) or Kyle Rayner (who followed after Stewart’s run in the comic book continuity.) It should be noted that in the Justice League cartoon series John Stewart is the same character serving as Earth’s Green Lantern.

The Flash is the youngest member of the JLA. He has a crush on Wonder Woman.

Wonder Woman is portrayed as the member that acts as defacto humanitarian and face for the League. Our source told us that the best way to describe how she is written in the script is to “think of Angelina Jolie and her relations with foreign countries.”

Follow the link for more details, including hints on a huge EMPIRE STRIKES BACK sized spoiler.

IESB are also reporting that the movie ends in a massive showdown between three of DC’s flagship heroes (if you don’t know who they are then Google Matt Wagner’s Trinity). All I can say is that’ll be a hell of a three-way!

As you may know, I recently saw the film In The Hands of The Gods and raved about the quality of this British-made documentary. With it’s impending release I have hunted down a number of cast and crew members in order to give you, our loyal Obsessed With Film readers, more of an insight into what makes this film so special. (Well, I say hunted down, I mean got invited to a round-table with them, but the end result for you guys is the same.) Anyway, sitting down with two of the freestylers, Jeremy and Woody, as well as producers Ben Winston and Leo Pearlman, and directors Ben and Gabe Turner I realised that I was there on a mission: I had to prove to the film-viewing public out there in the vacuous ether of the internet that this was the number one film to be seen this week in the UK, and not just the most recent recipient of my hyperbole-prone reviews. So here goes:

The story of the five lads who journey to America, with the intention of busking their way to Argentina to meet their hero Diego Maradona is an inspiring one, surely that’s a given. But the background to the film has a story of its own. The lads dreamed up their plan, and thought that it would be great if they could get their journey filmed - so set out to find someone crazy enough to do it. Unsurprisingly they met with a lot of sceptisism, director Gabe recalled challenging the boys to prove how much money they could make by busking for cash and then eating at the best restaurant they could, fully expecting a pizza to be headed their way. But no,

“at the end of the day they had enough money for a three course meal at the Savoy. They went in in their tracksuit bottoms with their pound coins in an American Football helmet, ate their meal, then tipped the money out on the table. Then we were like, ok, we’ll do it.”

Sitting around the table with these guys it’s not hard to see how the freestylers bonded with the production team, in the same way as the boys displayed their gutsiness in setting up the journey the producers and directors of Fulwell 73 (the company headed by the Turners, Winston and Pearlman) were leaping into the unknown with their first feature. Ben W was more than happy to draw the parallels of the importance of the film to the two groups:

“We set up our company, Fulwell 73 about 3 years ago, Gabe and Ben are obviously brothers, me and Gabe were in a band together and our mums were best friends, Leo is their cousin, so we were like family… so there was definitely something in the fact that we were four guys who’d never made a film before and had this dream of making a film and it makes me chuckle that these five guys were busking their way across the world and we were sort of busking our way across the world too.”

As they travelled it was inevitable that the ’stars’ and crew on the film would become closer. Ben T pointed out that they

“were very lucky that they [the freestylers] were prepared to be so honest with us along the way… I don’t think they realised untl we got there that the things they wanted us to film the least were the things we’d want to film the most.”

And there were many stories about points at which the crew felt torn between the success of the boys on their quest and the ultimate goal of the documentary, the group recall one instance in particular where they had been basically stuck in a car park in Dallas for weeks and couldn’t think of a way out, and one of the boys suggested stealing a car. Now on the one hand - this is clearly a ridiculous idea, but on the other, it’s a documentary! You can’t interfere. You never see David Attenborough leaping in front of an advancing lion to save a gazelle right? Right. And so it was resolved that the crew remained completely detached from the decisions made in the film. And this is very much to its credit, the natural development of Woody, Danny, Jeremy, Sami and Mikey through the film comes across crystal clear on screen, unencumbered by the interference of outside. Of course, they did still talk, but never did the production team lead on matters relating to the journey, or in drawing the multifaceted backgrounds of each of this diverse group out into the open, as Leo summarised:

“This wasn’t a film where they were interviewed. It was a film where when they wanted to talk they talked, and what happened, happened on screen…. We didn’t have any preconceptions of how we were going to portray this film.”

The purity of the documentary’s voice isn’t entirely due to a stoic detachment however. I did draw the directors into some comments on style and influences. When I asked about the absence of the sprawling scenery shots ubiquitous to the more ponderous travel tale, Gabe responded offhandedly that

“It’s like, in Shane Meadows films [where] he uses musical montage scenes of walking to control the pace. For us, the places were just a way of controlling the pace… so when we came into a place, as long as we had one slate which summed up what it was like and what you were meant to feel at that point in the film that would do the job.”

In the Hands of the Gods does indeed manage this feat, but I am reluctant to believe that it was easy as he made it sound, but then he’s a man who knows documentaries. Cited among his inspirations prior to making the film are the classic documentaries Dogtown and Z-boys, Spellbound and Être et Avoir, of which he went on to say

“It’s just great because its a real human story. But for us that was stylistically quite important because that film is a documentary shot like a piece of fiction and whereas nowadays a lot of feature films are shot documentary style. We tried to do the reverse like in Etre et Avoir… We wanted you to feel like the sixth member of the group.”

A welcome move indeed in a cinematic climate rife with ‘mockumentaries’and exagerrated claims that films are based on real events.

This release goes back to the heart of the documentary by telling a story, and capturing the essence of events as they happen rather than contorting ideas to fit a neat template or preconception.

Now it’s all well and good me harping on about the finer points of a ‘good documentary’, and posturing romantically as to the origins of a piece of cinema, but I am also aware that you all want to know some behind the scenes stuff. What did the cameras miss, and what was left on the cutting room floor? Well, given that filming produced over 150 hours of film it is not surprising that there were a few extra stories to tell! Nothing prepared me for the revelation from Jeremy, the softly spoken devout Christian:

“me and Sami, actually made a deal, and i don’t think you all knew about this - if we happened to find a sparring place - we would’ve had a spar… we’d have put gloves on and we’d have had it out.”

Certainly an idea with DVD bonus material potential! Of course, another aspect of the trip that would never have made the final cut was anything involving the Fulwell 73 troops, Ben W recalls one instance where he discussed with Woody the potential success of the film

“sitting on the back of a chicken bus in Guatemala… and remember really playing it down”

getting Woody prepared for being happy with a DVD release. Among his funniest memories, Jeremy recalls two instances which did not make the final version. One in which he balanced the ball on his head and proposed to a stranger - a feat which earned him the princely sum of $2 - and one in which, exasperated with their failure to earn money, he and Danny lay down in the middle of the Vegas strip at 3am, balanced their footballs on their noses and played dead. But the stories discussed by Jeremy and Woody are not limited to the funny side of the journey. Woody recalls one night spent in a mud hut with a family in Guatamala, a particularly significant scene in the film, and promptly runs into a proclaimation that

“no-one should feel sorry for them in any way, the reason being that they are really happy people. They don’t know the materialistic crap we know about and we’re surrounded by… They’re happier with the finer things in life, with waking up in the morning, with the sun blazing and with their families.. if only people in this country would realise what opportunities they’ve got.”

Perhaps such morals seem a little trite when they stand alone, but they are nonethless heartfelt, and the growth in character of all of the pilgrims is borne admirably well in the film.

In my humble opinion, In the Hands of the Gods provides as compelling a tale in itself as the story it relays. I suggest that those of you looking for entertainment this weekend spurn the seedy attractions of Knocked Up and Superbad, and go and see something infinitely more absorbing, funny and real. You’ll certainly get more out of it and at the same time support a bit of low-budget, high-quality British cinema. It’s win-win!

Even though the Justice League movie is moving ahead at a furious pace, Warner Bros seem adamant to not even acknowledge its existence - this despite the fact that everybody and their dog knows George Miller is prepping the project and casting has commenced in the US and Canada.

From our initial casting scoop I speculated that the movie might lens in Canada due to the presence of more offices up there than in the US, however it looks like that won’t be the case.

Thanks to info sent to us, primarily from an OWF reader in the Australian film community, we’ve now got several more bits of Justice League information to share with you:-

The studio has greenlit the project as their summer 2009 tentpole. Filming for the principals will take place in Sydney from February to June 2008 – George Miller was unsurprisingly listed as director in the info we got.

Auditions are starting up down under with Nikki Barrett (Baz Luhrmann’s Australia, The Proposition) hired to handle the casting in Australia. Ronna Kress (Beowulf, The Mummy 3) will oversee the entire casting process.

Oscar-winner Barrie M. Osborne (The Lord of the Rings, The Matrix) will take on producing duties; he’ll be joined by Miller’s partner Doug Mitchell.

Things seem to be pulling sharply into focus as the weeks progress, and with Osborne they have a top A-list producer who’s ideal to make a film of this size… but it’d still be nice to hear some official word from the studio.

I find Warners’ secrecy frustrating because, after all, they are just a movie studio making a comic film and not the CIA planning to take down a terrorist cell. However there’s a myriad of DC Comics films that have crumbled in various stages of production so the they have reason to be overly cautious with this one.

Yesterday we had word on possible titles for Fox’s X-Men spinoffs; today we’ve got exclusive details on the plot for David Goyer’s Magneto movie. The director spoke about plans to shoot in Argentina and Europe, and that his story will deal with the origins of Magneto and Professor X – but we’re able to give you a little more info, read on at your own peril:

The movie is book-ended with two scenes in Poland at the 60^th Anniversary of the Auschwitz Liberation. These events take place within the timeframe of the first three X-films and will reunite Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen.

The opening takes a cue from Bryan Singer’s X-Men, where a young Erik Lehnsherr crumples the Auschwitz gates. Erik is subjected to horrendous experiments by a team of scientists led by vicious Nazi Dr. Kleinmein.

We next meet Lehnsherr in Ukraine. It’s ten years later and he’s married to Magda, they have a young girl called Anya. Erik works in construction, his abilities are well developed, he’s able to plunge a nail straight through wood by just staring at it.

In the village pub Erik spots Kirken, an abusive prison guard from the concentration camp. Kirken ends up dead by Erik’s hand and the villagers burn down his house – Magda and Anya are killed in the blaze.

In Paris, Erik seeks help from famed Nazi hunter Professor Wesenthein – he wants revenge, more specifically he’s looking for Kleinmein. Wesenthein tells Erik many Nazi’s are hiding out on South America, and that Kleinmein was trying to genetically manufacture a master race for Hitler.

Erik moves on to Argentina to try and track down Nazi war criminals – he’s met by CIA agent Owen Graves and the pair fore an alliance. Graves tips off Erik on the whereabouts of known Nazis but also harbours his own agenda.

The action switches to Israel where Erik searches for a man well known for helping Holocaust survivors. He finds him playing soccer: Dr Charles Xavier…

Goyer’s take combines elements of his own Batman Begins, The Boys From Brazil and the existing X-Men film franchise. The scale is somewhat similar to the first X-Men movie, but multiple locations and a period setting could knock the budget up significantly.

Fans of the previous X-Men films will be pleased to know there are some other familiar faces in Magneto. Expect to see Senator Kelly return (a young and old version), along with mutants Victor Creed and Mystique.

There’s plenty more details which OWF may reveal later (even though this is a spoiler post, we don’t want to ruin the whole movie by going over every plot point).

One of the biggest hurdles this movie faces is casting the lead. An unknown won’t be able to sell this film to the casual moviegoer, so who could Fox and Goyer get to play the young Magneto?