Sporting a moustache grown for the new film he starts in Panama City next week, Brendan Gleeson spent last Monday in Dublin doing interviews with the Irish and British media to promote his next release, Lake Placid, which opens here on March 31st. Written and produced by Ally McBeal creator David E. Kelley, this tongue-in-cheek spin on monster movies features Bridget Fonda, Bill Pullman, Oliver Platt - and Gleeson as a dry-humoured Maine sheriff.
Relaxing over lunch on Monday, with seven interviews down and 13 to follow, Gleeson was looking forward to being reunited with John Boorman, his director on The General, when they begin Boorman's film of the John Le Carre novel, The Tailor of Panama, next week. The cast also features Pierce Brosnan, Jamie Lee Curtis, Geoffrey Rush and Catherine McCormack.
The in-demand Irish actor has four other movies completed for release later this year - reuniting with his I Went Down co-star Peter McDonald in Conor McPherson's Saltwater; playing a TV chef who loses his memory in Declan Lowney's film of Colin Bateman's Wild About Harry (formerly Thanks for the Memory); joining Tom Cruise, Anthony Hopkins and Ian McKellen in John Woo's mega-budget Mission Impossible 2, which was filmed in Australia; and co-starring with David Strathairn, Andie McDowell, Adrien Brody and Elias Koteas in Elie Chouraqui's Harrison's Flowers, a tough drama set during the Balkan conflict.
Under pressure from American ratings officials, the makers of American Psycho have cut parts of a sex scene to win an R rating and avoid the more restrictive NC-17 tag, the movie's US distributors, Lions Gate, said this week. However, they insist that only "a few seconds" were trimmed off a scene in which the protagonist, a serial killer played by Christian Bale, engages in sex with two prostitutes.
Musical chairs: John Madden, who made Shakespeare in Love, has replaced Notting Hill director Roger Michell, who is ill, on the film version of Captain Corelli's Mandolin, which will star Nicolas Cage. As a result, Gillian Armstrong takes over from Madden to direct Charlotte Gray, based on the wartime novel by Sebastian Faulks, and Armstrong has asked her fellow Australian, Cate Blanchett, to play the title role.
Blanchett is at present working in Savannah, Georgia on Sam Raimi's The Gift, scripted by Billy Bob Thornton and starring Keanu Reeves in a rare villainous role as a wife-beater. The cast also includes Katie Holmes, Giovanni Ribisi, Greg Kinnear and Oscar nominee Hilary Swank.
Finally taking a long overdue break from his string of simpering, quivering-lipped roles, Robin Williams is in talks with director Mike Nichols about taking the parts originally played by Alec Guinness in a remake of the 1949 comedy Kind Hearts and Coronets. Guinness played eight different characters in the film about a black sheep of the family who sets out to kill the eight relatives who stand between him and a family fortune.
Despite his popular success with The World is Not Enough and The Thomas Crown Affair, Pierce Brosnan has seen two of his movies go directly to video in the US in recent weeks. One is the Irish-made drama, The Nephew, which was released here two years ago. The other is the latest film from Oscar-winner Richard Attenborough, the $40 million Canadian epic Grey Owl, and there are no signs of it receiving a cinema release on this side of the Atlantic either. The factually-based film features Brosnan as a white Englishman who successfully reinvented him as a Native American in 1930s Ontario.
Describing it as "the most expensive video premiere since Whoopi Goldberg's disastrous Theodore Rex", Entertainment Weekly noted that Grey Owl "boasts superlative production design and stunning location photography" but added that "it's also, unfortunately, a low-key, high-minded snooze" and that "watching the movie feels akin to swimming through an enormous vat of caramel".