What's that, you say? An opportunity to use an image of Richard Gere in
American Gigolo? Yes, I will bite. And it didn't need to be
this good of news but it did anyway -- writer-director Paul Schrader is going to reunite with Gere on his next movie! They haven't worked together since that 1980 film, so this is a reunion four plus decades in the making -- it's apparently an adaptation of
Russell Banks' 2021 book Foregone, which Amazon describes thusly:
"At the center of Foregone is famed Canadian American leftist documentary filmmaker Leonard Fife, one of sixty thousand draft evaders and deserters who fled to Canada to avoid serving in Vietnam. Fife, now in his late seventies, is dying of cancer in Montreal and has agreed to a final interview in which he is determined to bare all his secrets at last, to demythologize his mythologized life. The interview is filmed by his acolyte and ex–star student, Malcolm MacLeod, in the presence of Fife’s wife and alongside Malcolm’s producer, cinematographer, and sound technician, all of whom have long admired Fife but who must now absorb the meaning of his astonishing, dark confession.
Imaginatively structured around Fife’s secret memories and alternating between the experiences of the characters who are filming his confession, the novel challenges our assumptions and understanding about a significant lost chapter in American history and the nature of memory itself. Russell Banks gives us a daring and resonant work about the scope of one man’s mysterious life, revealed through the fragments of his recovered past."
Sounds like something Schrader could make a real meal of, and it'd be swell for Gere to have a meaty role -- he's been doing terrific work for the past decade or so in movies that have flown under the radar but maybe this one, with this specific reunion, will make some noise. Also in
that original link is word that Schrader wrote a script for Elisabeth Moss to star in and direct -- no word on what it's about but Moss has proven a solid director on
The Handmaid's Tale and we of course (her awful religion aside) think she's one of the greatest actresses working today. So we'll follow this news too!
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