• Heavy Rain Film Adaptation on the Fast Track

    // Gradly // blog, Movies, News, PS3 1 Response

    The film rights to Heavy Rain have been owned for several years now, and it looks as if things are moving in a very positive direction. According to Variety, David Milch has signed on to adapt the game for the big screen.

    Milch was a co-creator and writer for NYPD Blue, John from Cincinnati, and Deadwood, among other things. He’s currently at work on a new series about horse racing for HBO called Luck. Once he’s done with the first season, he’ll begin writing Heavy Rain, Variety had to say about the project:

    David Milch is heading into “Heavy Rain,” signing to adapt the noir-style videogame with Bob Shaye and Michael Lynne producing through their Unique Features banner.

    As first reported on Variety.com, “Rain” is being developed via Unique’s first-look deal with Warner Bros., which is fast-tracking the project. Milch will start writing “Rain” once he’s finished work on the first season of HBO’s horse-racing series “Luck,” on which he’s creator and exec producer.

    “Heavy Rain,” based on the Sony Computer Entertainment game released last year, spans four days of mystery and centers on the hunt for a murderer known as the Origami Killer. Four characters, each following his own leads and with his own motives, take part in a desperate attempt to prevent the killer from claiming a new victim, with each character’s decisions affecting the plans of the other three.

    Milch has a big following from his role as creator/exec producer of “NYPD Blue” and “Deadwood.” “David Milch’s incredible ability to transform intense and complex storylines into gripping, popular drama makes him the perfect partner for us to have on ‘Heavy Rain,’ ” Shaye said.

    The game was created by Paris-based Quantic Dream, developers of “Indigo Prophecy,” and built around a 2,000-page script written by founder and CEO David Cage. Unique’s Dylan Sellers and Jonna Smith will join Shaye and Lynne in the development of the project along with Warner exec Courtenay Valenti.

    Shaye and Lynne, the former toppers at New Line, signed their first-look deal at Warners in 2008 a few months after the studio dramatically cut operations at the mini-major.

  • Are You Ready For Two More ‘Matrix’ Movies?!

    // Gradly // blog, Gossips, Movies, News No Responses

    Do you have the appetite for two more Matrix films? For me the answer to that question would hinge on whether the new movies were more like the first film or the latter two. Regardless, there’s some vague chance we might see more movies in the series. While appearing at the London School of the Performing Arts, Keanu Reeves said he recently met with the Wachowskis, who have written a treatment for two more Matrix movies.

    Before we get into the Matrix news, Keanu Reeves also said that the Robin Hood re-telling Hood was still in the works from the Wachowskis and that Will Smith had agreed to star, as per previous reports. And he says that Bill and Ted 3 is actively moving along and that he’s committed to it. Now for the Matrix.

    Here’s what the actor said in London, via an email sent to AICN:

    Says he met the Wachowski’s (no emphasis on the word brothers), for lunch over Christmas and stated that they had completed work on a two picture script treatment that would see him return to the world of the matrix as Neo. Says the brothers have met with Jim Cameron to discuss the pro’s and con’s of 3D and are looking to deliver something which has never been seen again. keanu stated that he still has an obligation to the fans to deliver a movie worthy of the title “The Matrix” and he swears this time that the treatment will truly revolutionise the action genre like the first movie. Wachowski’s are working on a movie called “Cloud Atlas” at the moment, once that concludes they will talk again.

  • THE LORD OF THE RINGS Extended Editions on Blu-Ray this year?

    // Gradly // blog, Movies, Rants & Raves 3 Responses

    It looks like The Lord of the Rings Extended Editions will finally be released on Blu-ray this year! I have been waiting to see them in the super high quality 1080p, and I won’t have to switch over the disc in the middle of the film. The news comes from The Digital Bits, and here’s what they had to say,

    Our sources are NOW telling us that WHV (and their now in-house New Line label) is ALSO planning to release Peter Jackson’s long-awaited The Lord of the Rings Trilogy: Extended Editions on Blu-ray sometime this year. No kidding. We suspect that, now that The Hobbit films are finally about to begin filming, the studio is eager to get more product on store shelves to keep the franchise fresh in the minds of fans. The Extended Rings films on BD are the obvious choice for this year. Farther down the line, of course, there will be the obvious Blu-ray and Blu-ray 3D versions of The Hobbit films, and sooner or later an “ultimate” box set of all the films with all new extras custom created by Jackson. Anyway, our sources tell us to expect some kind of official news on all this (re: Rings: Extended and Kubrick) from the studio in the next several weeks.

    [via: thedigitalbits]

  • The Henley Tilt-Shift Sequence from THE SOCIAL NETWORK

    // Gradly // blog, Facebook, Gossips, Movies, News 1 Response

    xvxcvxc

    Read what David Fincher had to say about the scene, check it out directly below and watch the scene again after that.

    “The Henley Royal Regatta were incredibly good to us and they allowed us to actually shoot the race at Henley. I had no idea how huge the Henley Royal Regatta was. I’d only seen photographs and a lot of them are telephoto so you don’t get the idea of this mile-and-a-half of grandstands and corporate sponsors. I mean, it’s a huge thing and we originally thought we would shoot a bunch of inserts on the Charles [River] and then use that footage to intercut with wide shots we’d shot at Henley.

    “The trick of this scene, and the thing that made it so difficult was, it’s not like the fight in Rocky where it’s been talked about forever and it’s importance has been established and you know what it means to the Winklevosses. You get dropped into the middle of this race, and I joked with Aaron [Sorkin] about it a lot, ‘How do I make people care about whether or not these guys win or lose a race that we don’t know where it is, we don’t know what it means?’ And he was like, ‘Well that’s your problem.’ [laughing]

    “He was using it as a way of saying, ‘You miss by that much.’ Then to have the Winklevosses miss by that much with Mark Zuckerberg, they missed by that much with Larry Summers, they’re missing by that much at Henley and it’s the final straw.

    “But it is a tricky thing to design a sequence around missing by that much when you literally get dropped into the middle of it. You really don’t know where you are, it requires a subtitle to tell you you’re now in Henley for the Henley Royal Regatta, which you probably don’t know is the Super Bowl of boat racing.

    “So this was one of those sequences where the only time we could shoot it was July 4, 2010. It was literally five to six weeks before we had to finish the movie. The movie had to be done so we could get it in theaters, and they were incredibly helpful to us and made it all possible.

    “We’d shot the post-Henley scene where they hear about Facebook, but the actual race itself was literally a one-minute-and-forty-second slug. I think when we showed the film to the New York Film Festival, where we showed the film to a lot of long-lead press it had a card that just said, ‘Incredibly involving and thrilling sequence at Henley Royal Regatta,’ that was it just a black card with white type on it. So when we finally got to shoot the scene it was a mad scramble to finish it.

    “One of the reasons it was done in this faux, swing and tilt– tilting lens board style was because all of the close-ups of the Winklevosses and the Dutch rowing were done in Eton on a man made lake that doesn’t look anything like Henley. Doesn’t have any– just has green grass, but we would shoot the close-ups of all the people and then we had to matte in still photographs that we’d shot at Henley.

    “There was a team of 20-35 artists who toiled around the clock to finish that sequence so we could get it out and get the movie done. And they did a great job.”