First up there’s a few new photos from Steven Soderbergh’s “The Informant!” a picture that we are dying to see this fall that makes its world premiere at the Toronto Film Festival. Some come from MTV, others from IMDB.
We’re a bit worried as to how it’s going to play. It is a Warner Bros. picture so they’ll have some juice to market it, but it looks a bit like a niche, black comedy ala the Coen Brothers, with Matt Damon as the film’s only real star wattage (i.e. will mainstream audiences go for it?). Damon put on some weight for this one, telling Entertainment Weekly that he gained 30 lbs for the film (wait, that’s it?) “I started eating like crazy and drinking dark beer. Between meals on set, I’d eat a No. 1 Value Meal at McDonald’s and then Doritos on top of it. It was absolute heaven,” he said (via popcrunch).
But maybe we’re not making note enough of some of the TV actors in the film that are surely known by mainstream America like “The Soup” host Joel McHale and Scott Bakula, who was on TV for several years in “Quantum Leap” and “Star Trek: Enterprise.”
“Arrested Development” star Tony Hale is also in the film and according to IMDB, Patton Oswalt and Melanie Lynskey also have roles. “I didn’t do that many days on it,” Oswalt told Movieline recently. “I’m just one of the gallery of incredulous faces that deals with Matt Damon as he goes crazier and crazier. But getting to watch Steven Soderbergh work and how he sets up shots and stuff was fascinating to me. The guy’s a pro. I don’t even think he’s an auteur; I think he’s a fucking pro. He comes in, and he’s calm, and he knows. That what’s so great about him.”
The picture, about a bumbling corporate whistleblower within the agricultural industry opens up on September 18 after being bumped up from its old October 9 release date (if you’re at TIFF, you generally don’t want to be in theaters weeks afterward, but instead capitalize on film festival buzz. TIFF runs September September 10-19). A commenter below wants you to know: The world premiere is at the Venice Film Festival on September 7. The North American premiere is on September 11 at Toronto.