Kathryn
Bigelow must be eager to get back on set and shooting again,
considering it’s been nearly a year since she took home a well-deserved
Oscar for Best Directing- the first ever awarded to a woman. While her
long planned follow up to the Hurt Locker, entitled Triple Frontier,
is on track to start shooting late next year with Tom Hanks, she’s
pitching a much smaller thriller that would get her behind a camera
early in 2010 to bust out a relatively small, $10m film before that one
gets going. There’s not much in the way of details, though it would
appear this is another timely military story, perhaps taken from a
newspaper article Bigelow has optioned, as Variety says the plot “concerns black ops and is based on a true story that has appeared in print.”
Mark Boal, who wrote The Hurt Locker and Triple Frontier,
will be joining Bigelow on this international journey as well, with
plans to write the script if they get the project picked up. Triple Frontier,
which will star the aforementioned Hanks, is employing its long-term
schedule to negotiate several other big-name actors to appear in the
ensemble piece (DiCaprio, Depp, and Will Smith have all been mentioned).
With this smaller interim piece, I wonder who they could wrangle in
front of the camera on such short notice. I can’t imagine many actors
that wouldn’t want
to work with the most-recent Best Director, but it’s going to be tough
finding someone who is free, in a world where the really interesting
stars have their next two years planned out with more movies than they could possibly be involved in.
I’m
excited to see what Bigelow and Boal make happen here, as the pair seem
really excited to take on all different parts of the globe. Directors
can sometimes churn out great work when they’re getting small passion
project squeezed in amongst other bigger films (Munich comes to mind).