The revolving door cum musical chairs game on “The Tourist” keeps going on and on.
To recap: Tom Cruise and Charlize Theron were once attached on this remake of a 2005 French romantic spy thriller (called, “Anthony Zimmerman”). Bharat Nalluri (“Miss Pettigrew Lives For a Day”) was the then-director. Cruise left, and Sam Worthington took his place. Then Theron and Nalluri split and Angelia Jolie entered the picture with director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck attached (the filmmaker behind the excellent 2007 German film, “The Lives Of Others” which won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film that year).
Last week it was announced that both Worthington and von Donnersmarck had left the project over creative differences and Johnny Depp was in talks to play the male lead and Mexican filmmaker, Alfonso Cuaron (“Children Of Men”) was eyeing the directors chair.
Maybe not so fast? Movieline ran into von Donnersmarck and he said he’s still attached to the project. “In the trades, everything they say…I think you can discount a lot of it,” he said. “It’s just a way of talking about the business, and sometimes things get out about heated points of discussion. We’ll see how it plays out with that one.”
Sounds like “creative differences” are part of the issue though. von Donnersmarck says he may or may not do the film, but his answer also sounds like a bit of damage control. “Whether I do “The Tourist” or not, I’m going to be doing something right afterward that I’ve been writing for quite a while and I’m now close to completion on. It’s like a political action drama. Does that exist as a genre?”
He tells Movieline that he will make a film in 2010, but it’s either “The Tourist” or this aforementioned political action drama, but it sounds like the producers of “The Tourist,” have already started looking elsewhere. Then again, it wouldn’t be the the first time producers in Hollywood have tried to make a director feel insecure by planting stuff in the trades that will make them cave and succumb to their wishes. We’ll see how it plays out, indeed.