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Tag: Eric Roth

  • Angelina Jolie to direct Richard Leakey biopic on ivory poaching

    Angelina Jolie to direct Richard Leakey biopic on ivory poaching

    MUMBAI: Oscar-winning actress Angelina Jolie is all set to direct a new film, a biopic of Kenyan politician and conservationist Richard Leakey and his battle to save the elephants of Kenya from the illegal ivory trade.

     

    Titled Africa, the story has been penned by the Forest Gump screenwriter Eric Roth. It will focus on Leakey’s fight against ivory poachers in the 1980s when he was the head of the Kenya Wildlife Services (KWS).

     

    Leakey, who is the son of the famous anthropologists Louis and Mary Leakey, is the former head of the Kenya Wildlife Service, and is known for taking a hardline stance against the country’s poachers. Working with Kenya’s then-President, Daniel Arap Moi, Leakey spearheaded the creation of armed anti-poaching units. During his time as the KWS chairman he ordered rangers to shoot any poachers they found.

     

    He made international headlines in 1989, after a stockpile of 12 tonnes of ivory, worth an estimated three million dollars, was burned in Nairobi National Park.

     

    In recent years, Leakey has continued to campaign against the slaughter of African wildlife, founding the charitable organisation ‘WildlifeDirect’, which provides support to conservationists working in Africa.

     

    Africa will be produced by Jolie, Man of Steel‘s Jon Peters and Skydance Productions. The cinematographer for the movie is Roger Deakins, an eleven-time Oscar nominee known for the Coen brothers’ No Country For Old Men.

     

    Africa would be Jolie’s fourth film as a director, following 2011’s In the Land of Blood and Honey, a romance set during the Bosnian War, Unbroken, the story of the Olympic athlete Louis Zamperini, which is due in theaters on Christmas Day and her latest movie By the Sea. Jolie serves as writer-director and star alongside her husband, Brad Pitt in the movie which is slated for a 2015 release.

  • Warner Bros revives ‘Shantaram’, Johnny Depp taps Joel Edgerton

    Warner Bros revives ‘Shantaram’, Johnny Depp taps Joel Edgerton

    MUMBAI: Warner Bros is in talks with Joel Edgerton to star in Shantaram, an adaptation of the Gregory David Roberts novel that is being produced by Inifinitum Nihil partners Johnny Depp and Christi Dembrowski, and GK Films’ Graham King. Following a couple of stalled attempts to get this feature adaptation up and running after the studio paid $2 million for the rights in 2004, Depp himself jump started the process by personally courting Edgerton to play a role Depp once intended to play before the film was derailed by the writer’s strike.

     

    Edgerton is being courted for the lead role of a remarkable protagonist who, at the time the book became a sensation in Hollywood, was said to have been modeled after the author in a thinly veiled memoir. He starts as an Australian heroin addict who escapes a maximum-security prison, reinvents himself as a doctor in the slums of India and eventually uses gun-running and counterfeiting skills to fight against the invading Russian troops in Afghanistan.

     

    Edgerton, who most recently starred in The Great Gatsby and Zero Dark Thirty, is Australian-born and fits the model of the protagonist very well. The script is by Eric Roth. Back when Depp was going to star.

  • Visual Effects Society urges new tax incentives for VFX units

    Visual Effects Society urges new tax incentives for VFX units

    MUMBAI: The Visual Effects Society (VES) has sent an open letter to the state of California to bring in new tax incentives and called for a VFX Congress to explore other solutions to the problems facing the visual-effects industry.

    The move followed a demonstration last Sunday that drew nearly 500 people representing the visual-effects community to focus on the film industry‘s attention on the economic problems threatening visual-effects houses.

    While the industry has been facing problems for some time, those issues have received more attention since Rhythm & Hues, the VFX studio behind the VFX of Life of Pi filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy protection earlier this month.

    VES did not organize the Oscar day demonstration, and as an honorary society, it does not have collective-bargaining power. But the open letter, signed by VES executive director Eric Roth, said VES intends to urge California Governor Jerry Brown and the state legislature to expand its tax-incentive program to include “a focused approach concentrated on the visual effects and post production sectors of the industry.”

    VES also plans to organize a VFX Congress to take place in the coming weeks because it feels that the industry has reached a tipping point for the visual effects industry.