andrew douglas Tagged Articles at Cinematical

Paul Bettany obviously has a thing for the sacrilegious. Fresh off playing the Archangel Michael in Legion, Bettany is reteaming with director Scott Stewart for Priest, ScreenGems' adaptation of Hyung Min-woo's popular manga series.

Bettany will play Ivan Isaacs, the warrior priest who turns his back on the Church to rescue his niece from a pack of vampires. The role once belonged to Gerard Butler, until the project fell apart sometime in 2006. ScreenGems revived the project last December with Stewart, keeping Cory Goodman's screenplay.

The casting came about not out of Bettany and Stewart's desire to reunite for religion, but due to ScreenGems president Clint Culpepper, who apparently thought Isaacs needed to be played by a former albino monk: "I knew the moment I saw Stewart's first cut of Legion that Bettany was Priest and so I mentioned it to him immediately."

Whether this Priest will make it any further into production than Andrew Douglas and Gerard Butler's will remain to be seen -- but since everyone wants their own religious pseudo-western, I bet the second time will be the charm. I still wish Butler's version would have taken off, but Bettany is probably a better physical choice for the role. He bears an uncanny resemblance to the art, anyway. I'm not a huge fan of the series, so hopefully some manga experts can weigh in with what they think of the casting.

Gone is the morally ambiguous costumed vigilante trend for 2009, and in comes the stiff white collars! Just in time to compete with Jonah Hex and Preacher comes the resurrected Priest. According to The Hollywood Reporter, ScreenGems is reviving the project and has brought on Scott Charles Stewart to direct Cory Goodman's screenplay.

Hyung Min-woo's manga has been kicking around for a few years -- Andrew Douglas was once set to direct, with Gerard Butler and Steven Straight starring, but that version abruptly fell apart around the time 300 was released. (I wish it had taken off now, I would much prefer to see Butler in a horror-Western than another romantic comedy. Well, no one's playing Ivan Isaacs yet ... are you still into taking priestly vows, Mr. Butler?)

Fans of the manga have complained that the story has been simplified to the point of having little in common with the original -- and sadly, that doesn't seem to have changed. The movie will still center on Isaacs as a warrior-priest who turns his back on the church in order to hunt a pack of vampires who have kidnapped his niece. However, considering that Stewart is fresh off filming the biblical thriller Legion, perhaps he'll rewrite it to include those demons, zombies, crucifixions, and evil angels that make Priest something more than a vampire story.

I'm not that attached to the manga, so I shall merely hope they can make an awesome horror-Western out of it. I firmly believe cinema needs a High Plains Drifter with vampires, zombies, and demons.

From Troma to indie superheroes to to cartoon adaptations to big-time monster-fests, James Gunn is a filmmaker I like to keep an eye on from time to time. I find his Slither to be a supremely entertaining mixture of comedy and horror, his The Specials a very funny little comedy (at least a whole lot funnier than the similar Mystery Men), and his Tromeo & Juliet the finest thing ever produced by Lloyd Kaufman's Troma team. And while director Zack Snyder did a great job on the Dawn of the Dead remake, let's not forget who penned the adaptation: Gunn did it. Basically, if I had the skills required to write and direct movies, they'd probably look a lot like James Gunn's flicks -- only with more nudity. (Oh, and check out LolliLove some time. Funny little film.)

So when we got a late call during Comic-Con asking us if we'd like to do a brief sit-down with Jimmy Gunn, I said "Heck, yeah. That guy's a nut." (That was literally what I said. Ask Erik.) And since I'd actually met James once before, it was much more laid-back than your typical interview. James Gunn is sort of like a grown-up child, which I mean as a compliment, and that always makes an interview a bit more entertaining. Plus he has great taste in schlock.

• Capote - Truman Capote spent five years researching In Cold Blood - the book that would be his last - and sophomore director Bennett Miller's film is a telling and rather literate fly-on-the-wall dramatization of that time. The biggest appeal is Philip Seymour Hoffman's bravura Oscar-winning performance as the eccentric author, which he takes beyond mere affectation and into full-on obsession as Capote's research into the 1959 murders of a Kansas family consumes him in every way. It is nice to see professional seether Catherine Keener in another nice-gal role, here as Capote friend and soon-to-be To Kill A Mockingbird scribe (Nell) Harper Lee. Miller and writer Dan Futterman (adapting Gerald Clarke's book) do not quite commit to a direction for the story, and humanizing killer Perry Smith (a dependable Clifton Collins Jr.) is time unwisely spent, though Hoffman, who also produced, sees that we remember the film for other reasons.

Priest is a manhwa (which, I understand, is the word for a Korean comic) series by writer Min-Woo Hyung. According to an early online review, the first volume in the series - about a former priest who, upon his death, is forced to trade his soul to a devil "in return for resurrection and the power to pursue his revenge against [a] fallen archangel" who he pursues across the American west - is "a fighting comic" that reads "like...a videogame." If that's true, it sounds right up the alley of pretty much everyone making movies these days, including Priest production team Joshua Donen, Michael De Luca, and the very busy Sam Raimi. Plus, as a bonus, the violence, western setting, and revenge theme make it sound a little like Django, but that might be wishful thinking on my part. (Variety offers a slightly different summary of the story - theirs involves "a band of renegade vampires" and a "young sheriff." I assume this specific event is from a later volume in the series that was adapted for the movie, but I'd love a firm answer from a Priest reader.)

The film - Cory Goodman's screenwriting debut - is due to be directed by Andrew Douglas, whose directorial experience consist of the rather mismatched pair The Amityville Horror and the Jim White road picture, Searching for the Wrong-Eyed Jesus; production is set to being this summer.