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Post by Ace on Apr 19, 2012 22:16:51 GMT -5
Toni Collette lines up indie roles Thesp in talks for 'Miss You Already,' 'Long Way Down' By Jeff Sneider
Toni Collette, who's currently shooting Fox Searchlight's "Hitchcock" and will spend her summer filming Jim Rash and Nat Faxon's directorial debut "The Way, Way Back," has lined up roles in two more prestige indies, as she's in negotiations to join Jennifer Aniston in Paul Andrew Williams' "Miss You Already" and Pascal Chaumeil's "The Long Way Down," based on the book by Nick Hornby.
Pierce Brosnan is also in negotiations to star in "Long Way Down," which will be produced by Amanda Posey and Finola Dwyer, the Oscar-nominated duo who previously worked with Hornby on "An Education."
Jack Thorne adapted Hornby's novel, which follows four strangers on New Year's Eve who coincidentally plan to jump to their deaths from the same rooftop. Collette is in talks to play the helpless single mom of a disabled young man, while Brosnan is in talks to play a scandal-plagued talkshow host. Pic will shoot from late summer to early fall in London.
In "Miss You Already," Collette and Aniston would play lifelong best friends who help each other face the biggest challenges of their respective lives as one battles breast cancer and the other prepares for the birth of her first child while the baby's father is away on business. Collette is negotiating to play the latter character, who's the more reserved of the duo.
Williams wrote the script with Morwenna Banks, and Chris Simon is producing the dramatic two-hander, which will shoot this fall in London. The Weinstein Co. just picked up Williams' "Song for Marion" for domestic distribution and is planning an awards push for the film later this year.
Collette is currently working with Anthony Hopkins on the Los Angeles set of Sacha Gervasi's "Hitchcock," in which she plays the "Psycho" helmer's fiercely protective longtime assistant. Once she wraps that period pic, the "United States of Tara" alum will segue to "The Way, Way Back," in which she'll play the young protag's mother and wife of Steve Carell's philandering character.
Collette was last seen in DreamWorks' "Fright Night," and she next stars opposite Michael Sheen in "Jesus Henry Christ." Aussie thesp has also reunited with her "Muriel's Wedding" helmer P.J. Hogan on "Mental," which co-stars Liev Schreiber.
Collette is repped by WME, United Agents, Shanahan Management and attorney Deborah Klein
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Post by Ace on Apr 19, 2012 22:24:03 GMT -5
From Amazon Official Review:
Reading a Nick Hornby novel is like having a chat in a pub with a witty, garrulous friend. He leans in close, addressing you directly; you can almost feel his hot breath on your neck. There's the wink-wink, nudge-nudge intimacy of a long friendship, and the instant intensity that goes with that.
But if the self-deprecating, brutally honest voice makes you laugh, it would be a mistake to say that Hornby writes for pure comedic value, or that his purpose is insubstantial. Each of his four novels has been a darkly humourous musing on depression in its various guises. A Long Way Down, a farcical black comedy, marks a natural progression along this trajectory, opening with the suicidal intentions of the book's four characters as they meet on the roof of a London tower block popular with citizens looking for a final way out.
Toppers' House is such an infamous spot, in fact, that the rooftop is encircled by a spiky-topped wire fence. One of the four, a sardonic, defrocked talk-show host, is nevertheless enterprising enough to bring wire cutters and a stepladder. Tapping on his shoulder to inquire about the loan of the ladder is Maureen, a middle-aged woman who has spent her entire adult life caring for her severely handicapped son and has planned her death months in advance. As the two sort out the arrangement, sixteen-year-old Jess, the foul-mouthed, unstable daughter of a Labour minister, charges at them, hollering her intention to beat both of them to the punch. With the addition of JJ, a struggling pizza-delivering American musician who just lost his band and his girl, the set is complete.
Suicide, it seems, is best accomplished in solitude, and all four lose their nerve because others are present. They agree instead to try to help young Jess, whose main trouble is romantic, and after eating the pizza JJ has provided, they descend the steps of Toppers' House to find the boy in question.
At a certain point the plot teeters, as if on the edge of a rooftop, threatening to topple toward certain doom. The four characters have decided not to jump; now what? Other characters who come in contact with them question this improbable coalition of the Toppers' House Four as if Hornby is trying to work it out himself. The story hobbles along briefly and then breaks into a full run, veering sharply into farce, as this unlikely crew grapple with Life After Topper's House. They become a post-suicidal posse, and find themselves in a variety of bizarre situations involving a media interview about their (faked) angel sighting, a vacation in Tenerife, a Topper's House reunion in situ on February 14, and a book club that reads only suicidal authors. Their regular gatherings at Starbucks culminate in an American-style "intervention", complete with former lovers, parents, and friends. The potential here for black humour is enormous, and Hornby doesn't disappoint.
Hornby has said that his books begin with situations: a guy invents a child to meet single women (About a Boy), a married man gives ú80 to a homeless person (How to be Good). In A Long Way Down, the meeting of potential suicides at a popular offing location becomes a means for bringing together four characters who would, ordinarily, never have occasion to meet. The creative advantage of this situation is the fact that the usual social rules don't apply; each has already decided to opt out in the most explicit way. But how long will it be before they coalesce and produce a new social order? In Hornby's imagined world, even the foul-mouthed teenager is apologizing to the middle-aged woman for her language within a few days, and here Hornby's vision of unregulated humanity is diametrically opposed to that of William Golding (in Lord of the Flies). A Long Way Down suggests that when left to their own devices outside the usual social norms, people will behave decently and help one another survive.
As the characters grudgingly retreat from the brink and its purgative allure, the heroism of daily living emerges as a thematic thread. JJ wryly remarks that Maureen is taking "the long way down" when she descends the staircase again on Valentines Day, and she observes that "there are other ways of dying, without killing yourself." If A Long Way Down is aphoristic, it's only so in a teasing way, as though Hornby wants to poke fun at the idea that truth should be revealed in pithy narrative.In his world, humour and pain coexist easily and necessarily.
Hornby has done well for himself with the intimate, first-person reflections of the twenty- or thirty-something male (the voice in High Fidelity is particularly well sustained and truthful), but his female characters in this book are less convincing. Jess's mature and perceptive observations are implausible at times; in comparison with Miriam Toews's Nomi (from A Complicated Kindness), whose youthful, profane voice rings with the wisdom of deep sorrow, Jess is flighty, less mature, and her musings don't ring true. Maureen's acceptance of her sad lot in life is also puzzling. She is positioned as the stable centre of the group who never erupts, although she has plenty of reasons for doing just that.
A Long Way Down has a filmic quality, which isn't surprising considering that screenwriting was Hornby's original career aspiration. The plot is largely driven by snappy dialogue; reading without imagining it on-screen is difficult. (Three of his books have been adapted to film; Johnny Depp reportedly bought the film rights to this novel before it was even published.) A Long Way Down is Breakfast Club meets Weekend at Bernie's with a British accent, a delicious, darkly humourous romp and an enjoyable read. It isn't as technically finessed as High Fidelity, but as long as Hornby writes the screenplay, all should go well.
--- Christine Fischer Guy (Books in Canada)
From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. If Camus had written a grown-up version of The Breakfast Club, the result might have had more than a little in common with Hornby's grimly comic, oddly moving fourth novel. The story opens in London on New Year's Eve, when four desperate people—Martin, a publicly disgraced TV personality; Maureen, a middle-aged woman with no life beyond caring for her severely disabled adult son; Jess [...]; and JJ, an American rocker whose music career has just ended with a whimper—meet on the roof of a building known as Toppers' House, where they have all come to commit suicide. Bonded by their shared misery, the unlikely quartet spends the night together, telling their stories, getting on each others' nerves even as they save each others' lives. They part the following morning, aware of having formed a peculiar sort of gang. As Jess reflects: "When you're sad—like, really sad, Toppers' House sad—you only want to be with other people who are sad."It's a bold setup, perilously high-concept, but Hornby pulls it off with understated ease. What follows is predictable in the broadest sense—as the motley crew of misfits coalesces into a kind of surrogate family, each individual takes a halting first step toward creating a tolerable future—but rarely in its particulars. Allowing the four main characters to narrate in round-robin fashion, Hornby alternates deftly executed comic episodes—an absurd brush with tabloid fame, an ill-conceived group vacation in the Canary Islands, a book group focused on writers who have committed suicide, a disastrous attempt to save Martin's marriage—with interludes of quiet reflection, some of which are startlingly insightful. Here, for example, is JJ, talking about the burden of understanding that he no longer wants to kill himself: "In a way, it makes things worse, not better.... Telling yourself life is shit is like an anesthetic, and when you stop taking the Advil, then you really can tell how much it hurts, and where, and it's not like that kind of pain does anyone a whole lot of good."While the reader comes to know all four characters well by the end of the novel, it's Maureen who stands out. A prim, old-fashioned Catholic woman who objects to foul language, Maureen is, on the surface, the least Hornbyesque of characters. Unacquainted with pop culture, she has done nothing throughout her entire adult life except care for a child who doesn't even know she's there and attend mass. As she says, "You know that things aren't going well for you when you can't even tell people the simplest fact about your life, just because they'll presume you're asking them to feel sorry for you." Hornby takes a Dickensian risk in creating a character as saintly and pathetic as Maureen, but it pays off. In her own quiet way, she's an unforgettable figure, the moral and emotional center of the novel. This is a brave and absorbing book. It's a thrill to watch a writer as talented as Hornby take on the grimmest of subjects without flinching, and somehow make it funny and surprising at the same time. And if the characters occasionally seem a little more eloquent or self-aware than they have a right to be, or if the novel turns just the tiniest bit sentimental at the end, all you can really fault Hornby for is an act of excessive generosity, an authorial embrace bestowed upon some characters who are sorely in need of a hug.175,000 first printing.(June)
-- Tom Perrotta's most recent novel, Little Children, has just been published in paperback by St. Martin's Griffin.
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Post by piercebrosnanhot on Apr 26, 2012 19:54:12 GMT -5
Emile Hirsch Joins Toni Collette & Pierce Brosnan In Big Screen Version Of Nick Hornby's 'A Long Way Down'
April 26, 2012 5:38 PM
Emile Hirsch certainly isn't predictable. The actor has vacillated from indie movies to blockbusters to everything in between, and you only have to look at his recent batch of films -- "Killer Joe," "The Darkest Hour," "Savages" -- to realize that he moves very much to the beat of his own drum. So a movie based on a book by "High Fidelity" and "About A Boy" writer Nick Hornby? Why the hell not?
THR reveals that Hirsch has joined "A Long Way Down," a project that is quickly pulling together its cast, having landed Toni Collette and Pierce Brosnan earlier this month. The story centers on a quartet of people who meet by chance on New Year's Day in the same location, where they had each planned to commit suicide, with Collette to play a mother of a disabled son, while Brosnan will portray a talkshow host whose life has been ruined by a scandalous affair. We presume Hirsch will be playing J.J., a pizza delivery man and former rocker who gave up his dreams of being a rock star to be with a girl only for the band to break up and his girlfriend to dump him.
Sounds like some potentially strong fare, and movies from Hornby's films generally tend to be a cut above the competition. Pascal Chaumeil (of the arthouse rom-com hit "Heartbreaker") will be directing, with production slated to kick off this fall.
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Post by chelseabrosnan on May 10, 2012 20:05:36 GMT -5
Emile Hirsch Takes ‘A Long Way Down’ With Toni Collette and Pierce Brosnan
April 26, 2012 at 8:29 pm
Emile Hirsch probably should’ve been nominated for an Oscar when he led Into the Wild and, though I don’t know how much that snub affected his career, the going’s been a little rough in the years since that film hit. Although Speed Racer has its defenders (who are wrong, by the way), the best thing on his plate in the time since has been, what, practically a walk-on role in Milk? And then there was The Darkest Hour a few months back…
So this latest news gives me some hope. Buried in a THR (via ThePlaylist) article about Rooney Mara leading Brooklyn is the ever-so-slight mention that Hirsch will co-star in A Long Way Down, which managed to nab Toni Collette and Pierce Brosnan about a week ago. Based on the novel by Nick Hornby (An Education) and directed by Pascal Chaumeil, the story revolves around four people who find themselves all attempting to jump from the same high-rise location on New Year’s Eve, with Collette playing the mother of a disabled child and Brosnan taking a washed-up talk show host.
Knowing that, it’s speculated Hirsch will be seen as J.J., a once-promising rock star now delivering pizzas and unwanted by his former girlfriend. There’s some actual, dramatic meat there, with which one of this generation’s most talented actors can dig into. Needless to say, I’m definitely rooting for Long Way Down to impress when it hits sometime next year.
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Post by rosafermu on May 11, 2012 8:59:24 GMT -5
Estoy impaciente por ver esta película, a pesar de que falta mucho tiempo aún. Gracias
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Post by Ace on May 16, 2012 17:42:35 GMT -5
Cannes 2012: Imogen Poots Signs for 'A Long Way Down'5/16/2012 by Stuart Kemp Pierce Brosnan, Toni Collette and Emile Hirsh also star in the adaptation of Nick Hornby's best-selling novel with BBC Films backing. Imogen Poots has signed to star opposite Pierce Brosnan, Toni Collette and Emile Hirsh in French filmmaker Pascal Chaumeil's A Long Way Down. The script details the story of four disparate individuals who meet one another on a London roof top on New Year's Eve all with the same intention to commit suicide. Instead of jumping, these complete strangers make a pact to stay alive and stay together until Valentine's Day, at least. Marking Chaumeil's English-language debut, the project is an adaptation of Nick Hornby's novel of the same name and is being produced by Finola Dwyer and Amanda Posey via the duo's Wildgaze Films. BBC Films, the pubcaster's standalone movie-making unit, has come aboard as equity co-financier and U.K. broadcaster. Making it's market debut at the Marche du Film, sales banner Hanway Films has inked deals with Lionsgate for U.K. rights -- aside from TV broadcast -- while DCM , formerly Delphi, has taken the title for German speaking Europe and Svensk signed for Scandinavia. In addition to the German speaking rights DCM is also acting as an equity co-producer. Chaumeil directs from a script by Jack Thorne (The Scouting Book For Boys) with shooting scheduled to start in September on location in London.
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Post by eaz35173 on May 16, 2012 19:46:32 GMT -5
I'll ask here, too..... so, what does all this studio talk mean in layman's terms? I think I need a translator. ;D
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Post by Ace on May 17, 2012 5:16:28 GMT -5
Just who's buying the rights to distribute the film in what country. That Lionsgate has already bought the UK rights months before filming is a good sign - and might point to their obtaining US rights.
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Post by eaz35173 on May 17, 2012 5:23:29 GMT -5
Thank you!
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Post by Ace on Aug 13, 2012 13:23:42 GMT -5
upandcomers.net/2012/08/13/aaron-paul-replaces-emile-hirsch-in-a-long-way-down-opposite-imogen-poots/Emile Hirsch is out, Aaron Paul is in for the big screen adaptation of Nick Hornby novel “A Long Way Down”, according to Deadline. The “Breaking Bad” star, who will play a pizza delivery man, joins Pierce Brosnan (a TV talk show host), Toni Colette (the mother of a disabled boy) and Imogen Poots (a depressed teenage girl) in the dark comedy about a quartet of down on their luck people who all coincidentally choose the same rooftop to commit suicide from one New Year’s Eve. After running into each other, they decide to make a pact to stay alive and stay together through Valentine’s Day. French director Pascal Chaumeil will make his English-language film debut on the project from a script by Jack Thorne. Filming is set to begin in September on location in London. Paul went from an acclaimed role on HBO series “Big Love” to an even more acclaimed (indeed, Emmy winning) role as Jesse Pinkman on AMC series “Breaking Bad.” He starred opposite Mary Elizabeth Winstead in Sundance hit “Smashed”, which generated positive buzz and is set for release later this year, and was also shortlisted for the role of John McClane, Jr. in “A Good Day to Die Hard”, ultimately losing out to Aussie newcomer Jai Courtney. He recently wrapped up indie “Decoding Annie Parker” opposite Helen Hunt and Samantha Morton.
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Post by Ace on Sept 6, 2012 1:04:33 GMT -5
Filming has begun in London (where they actually had fake rain on a sunny day) www.splashnewsonline.com/2012-09-06/its-wet-way-down-for-pierce-brosnan/attachment/120278/We spotted actor Pierce Brosnan having a little wet and wild fun while filming in London, England. The former 007 star is shooting a comedy drama or “dramedy” as we say in the biz, called A Long Way Down with Toni Collette and Imogen Poots. According to IMDB, it’s about “four people meet on New Year’s Eve and form a surrogate family to help one another weather the difficulties of their lives.”
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Post by piercebrosnanhot on Sept 6, 2012 3:43:19 GMT -5
HEY THANKS ACE... WHAT IS THE RED THING IN HIS HAND??
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Post by piercebrosnanhot on Sept 6, 2012 3:49:32 GMT -5
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Post by eaz35173 on Sept 6, 2012 5:58:07 GMT -5
It looks like a child's doll
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Post by piercebrosnanhot on Sept 6, 2012 7:26:56 GMT -5
DOLL!!
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Post by Ace on Sept 6, 2012 9:30:01 GMT -5
PBH, great photos I just moved the post to this topic since Zimbio has it wrong - these are from Long Way Down filming.
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Post by paulling on Sept 6, 2012 11:18:23 GMT -5
I'm a little bit confused. What are they shooting "Love Punch" or "Long Way Down"?
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Post by rosafermu on Sept 6, 2012 11:44:12 GMT -5
I think Splash is right and is about filming Long Way Down, although you may be right Zimbio site filming Lauderdale House, in North London Attachments:
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Post by Ace on Sept 6, 2012 12:23:11 GMT -5
Filming of Love Punch was over last month. These are from The Long Way Down. You can see the co-stars from the film in the shots where he's sitting down - there's Toni Collete, Aaron Paul and Imogen Poots
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Post by rosafermu on Sept 6, 2012 12:44:38 GMT -5
Thanks Ace. I saw it.
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