Following his decision last year to film Prometheus – a prequel to the highly successful Alien series – in Alicante’s City of Lights studio, it is now reported that top Hollywood director, Ridley Scott, looks likely to return to the city and the Ciudad de la Luz for a further two movies.
The first, The Counselor, is Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Cormac McCarthy’s first feature film screenplay and will star Brad Pitt, Javier Bardem and Michael Fassbender. Naturally, due to the combination of a great writer and a top flight director, there has been considerable speculation about this convergence of talents, not least because this project will also mark the first time that Scott has collaborated with Brad Pitt since giving him his first big Hollywood break in 1991’s Thelma and Louise.
Industry insiders have indicated that Pitt will play a character called Westray, who supplies a lawyer (played by Fassbender) with $20 million worth of cocaine. While the actor hinted that his character was less than an all-out villain, he did admit that The Counselor would mark a return to playing darker characters, a challenge that he clearly relishes.
Michael Fassbender will play the titular role, a lawyer who turns to the drugs trade to make some fast money, but who finds that it is more difficult than he originally envisaged to make a graceful exit, when he inadvertently falls in with some very dangerous and unpleasant people. The Manichean nature of this film will surprise no one who has ever read a Cormac McCarthy novel, and the participation of Pitt, Bardem and Fassbender – who is currently one of Hollywood’s hottest properties – not to mention Ridley Scott, will also help to recoup the costs of the project.
The second movie to be filmed in Alicante has yet to be named, but it is rumoured to have a budget of 20€ million, surely not sufficient for it to be the film for which every Ridley Scott fanatic is longing; the eagerly awaited sequel to his 1982 classic, Blade Runner, a cinematic gem that appears in the Top Ten of almost every influential movie critic in the world.
If fans are to be appeased, Scott should swing into action soon: he will turn 75 at the end of November and Harrison Ford, who played replicant P.I. Rick Deckard in the original film, is almost 70 years old. Already, eager wits are claiming that this long delayed project will have to contain as little running as possible.
Photos courtesy of: E-gov Flash Blog
