You can rightly call him the douche auteur, but it’s hard to deny that there aren’t many comedy director that make films as distinctive and tonally unified as Todd Phillips. Looking at his films or his own persona, it wouldn’t be hard to guess that Phillips has aspirations to move beyond comedy filmmaking and into something darker, and now it seems Paramount is going to give him a chance. Not only that, but they’ll be giving him the keys to a crime drama remake of The Gambler, which was recently a potential Scorsese project, and features a script from Oscar-winner William Monahan (The Departed). That’s a stacked deck entry to drama if there ever was one.
It will be some time before Phillips sinks his teeth into the remake, as he’s still set to begin on The Hangover III next month. When he does get to it next year, he’ll have original producer Irwin Winkler in his corner.
If you’re not familiar, The Gambler was released in 1974 and stars Jimmy Caan in a very loose adaptation of a Dostoyevsky short story. Caan plays an english professor in deep with some New York mobsters, and as the character struggles with his gambling addiction, so did Caan struggle with his real-life addiction to coke at the time.
No word on a new star, but expect to start hearing some details once Phillips has gotten The Hangover shot and gets deep into active development on this one. Bradley Cooper seems like an obvious guess though, no?
Source | THR (via Dark Horizons)