Remember “The Middle Child”? An old Jonah Hill-penned/to-be-produced by Judd Apatow project/idea (circa 2007) about a boy (Hill) who discovers his older brother was given up for adoption before he was born and when the brother (would have been Seth Rogen) is reunited with his family, the young man’s world is torn asunder as he suddenly has to face middle child syndrome (Rogen’s character is evidently welcomed with open arms as the “child they always wanted” and Hill finds himself ostracized and on the outs)?
While Hill and Apatow were actively looking for directors in 2007, you can now scratch it off the IMDB page, cause it’s dead.
“It was just too close in tone and somewhat in story to [the Apatow-produced] “Step Brothers,” Hill told The Playlist at a press junket for “Cyrus” conducted this morning (more on that one closer to release, but you can read our thumbs up review here). “So we just didn’t end up pursuing it cause we really liked ‘Step Brothers’ a lot, I think it was hysterical.”
But Apatow/Hill fans with long-term memories will at least be happy to hear about another old project (circa 2007/08), “Pure Imagination,” which centers around a kid who goes through a series of traumatic events and then develops an imaginary friend. “It’s definitely still something I’m working on. It’s a really hard movie to crack because it’s such an intricate story,” Hill said. “It’s about a guy who basically has an imaginary friend. His girlfriend breaks up with him and then his life kinda goes crazy and he goes through a bit of a meltdown. And his life picks back up when he meets this guy and in the midst of this breakdown, he realizes he’s best friends with someone who doesn’t exist. And then in the middle of all this he starts dating this girl and isn’t quite sure if she exists or not, but then decides he doesn’t want to know, because he likes her so much.”
Hill said capturing and calibrating the exact right tenor to the script has been tough. “It’s a tricky movie,” he said noting it’s his favorite project he’s conceived of, but something he wants to execute well. “You don’t want it to be cheesy and — ‘oh he keeps missing her!’ or something silly like that. You want it to be cool and visually cool and not feel like a one trick pony. It’s a matter of figuring out how layered you can make something that’s high concept like that, but still make it as grounded and real as possible and that’s a hard tone to nail down.”
“There’s a really terrible version of that movie,” he joked about his cautiousness so far and the reason it hasn’t been rushed into production.
Hill is shooting “Moneyball” this summer with Brad Pitt and director Bennett Miller, “The Sitter” with filmmaker David Gordon Green in the fall and hopes to get started on “21 Jump Street” with the “Cloudy With A Chance of Meatballs” guys Phil Lord and Chris Miller sometime in early 2011 if all goes according to plan.
“I haven’t acted in a year, so it’s exciting for me,” Hill said of his upcoming busy schedule. “It’s exciting to start actually shooting a moving and stop talking about other movies that I shot a year ago.” More from this interview tomorrow. — interview conducted by Christopher Bell.