As our retrospective in the summer showed, it’s nearly impossible to predict what prolific, chameleonic British director Michael Winterbottom will turn his hand to next. Coming off “The Killer Inside Me,” the most divisive film in his career (and in this writer’s view, one of the best), he’s already premiered “The Trip,” his reteam with “Tristram Shandy” stars Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon, at Toronto, and he’s expected to shoot the potentially combustible drama “The Promised Land,” about the founding of Israel, with Colin Firth, Jim Sturgess and Matthew Macfayden, any day now (although word’s been a little quiet on that for a while…).
Now news has broken of another potential project for the director, one that would again see him team up with his “Genova” star Colin Firth to take on a controversial true story. The Guardian revealed that Winterbottom is currently in Perugia, Italy to research a fictional drama based around the murder there in 2007 of British exchange student Meredith Kerchner, and the subsequent trial and conviction of American student Amanda Knox, and Knox’s boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito.
The case has become a well-reported one over the years, thanks to the gory details of the murder itself, and the subsequent behavior of Knox, who falsely accused her employer, Patrick Lumumba, of the killing, and whose attention-seeking behavior gained her the nickname in the tabloid press ‘Foxy Knoxy.’ Nevertheless, doubts remain about the even-handedness of the legal process; another man, Rudy Guede, had already been tried and convicted of Kercher’s murder, and some of the forensic evidence is inconsistent.
A Lifetime movie based on the story is already in the works, with “Heroes” star Hayden Panettiere starring as Knox, but we imagine Winterbottom’s version will be a little less salacious; he told The Guardian, “You are drawn into this story, it is a puzzle. Usually puzzles in films are fake, but this is one without a solution.” It appears that Firth will play a journalist covering the murder, and Winterbottom seems like he’ll have his “A Mighty Heart” docu-drama hat on, telling the paper “I have no view on whether they did it, the film will not be about that. There is unlikely to be a character playing Knox.”
Indeed, it seems like it’ll examine the media more than the death itself: a number of journalists were criticized for bias during the case, on both sides, and Winterbottom explains what attracted him to the project “The taking sides over the case was extreme here. There was no explanation that covered everything and the journalists were drawn in in a way you would not expect”
All in all, it’s sounding like Winterbottom’s take on something like “Zodiac,” which makes us pretty excited. With Knox’s appeal being prepared, and the director nominally tied up with “The Promised Land,” it’s unlikely to go before cameras until next year. But with Firth heading for his second Oscar nomination in two years, his presence certainly makes it more likely that we’ll see the film down the line.