This is me to Paul Verhoeven: Just make the bloody Jesus movie, OK. Please? If Gibson can do it, so can you. (I know, the book is just coming out and you need time to get the project up. My patience has limits.) You’ve got a small handful of good cred based on Black Book, but that movie is already beginning to look like ancient history. Attaching yourself to projects all over town is well and good, but you’ve gotta commit eventually.
I just hope it isn’t to Wendy miller’s currently untitled thriller script, which (according to Variety) follows “a college intern who finds himself trapped in a dangerous affair with the boss’s wife.” Hey, just rewrite The Secret of My Success already. Maybe with actual direct incest this time? Then I’d kick in some money for Verhoeven’s movie myself. (And I’ll admit that this idea is better than a Thomas Crown Affair sequel, even if that might be a pseudo-remake of Dassin’s entertaining Topkapi.)
The untitled project is set up at Relativity Media through Michael DeLuca’s production company. Relativity wants the thing going by the beginning of the year, and Verhoeven is playing construction site foreman to the rewrite process; I imagine him in a palatial hotel suite with a vest, hardhat and walkie-talkie, standing under a piece of scaffolding in the corner with Miller grimacing as she takes orders atop the scaffold. I don’t know why.