David Cronenberg is feeling prolific. While he’s got his latest film, A Dangerous Method, underway, he’s already casting his next picture, based on a Don DeLillo novel Cosmopolis. He’s hired Colin Farrell and Marion Cotillard to topline, and he’ll be shooting next spring in Toronto and New York.
Here’s the synopsis from Wikipedia:
Like James Joyce’s Ulysses, Cosmopolis covers roughly one day of time and includes highly sexed women and the theme of father-son separation. [Eric] Packer’s voyage is obstructed by various traffic jams caused by a presidential visit to the city, a funeral procession for a Sufi rap star and a full-fledged riot. Along the way, the hero has several chance meetings with his wife, seeing her in a taxi, a bookstore, and lying naked in the street, taking part in a movie as an extra. Meanwhile, Packer is stalked by two men, a comical “pastry assassin” and an unstable “credible threat”. Through the course of the day, the protagonist loses incredible amounts of money for his clients by betting against the rise of the yen, a loss that parallels his own fall.
Farrell will play Packer, a billionaire, while Cotillard will play his wife. I haven’t read Cosmopolis despite really loving most of the rest of DeLillo’s canon; maybe it’s the very negative reviews that kept me away. It’s interesting that Cronenberg would be tackling one of DeLillo’s lesser novels, but it isn’t like he hasn’t taken on difficult works before.