Big prospects

GOLD | Matthew McConaughey goes thin-on-top for this modern-day treasure hunt.

Double-take. It’s the first thing you’ll do upon seeing Matthew McConaughey and Bryce Dallas Howard in Gold.

Pot-bellied and balding, McConaughey appears to be following Black Mass’ Johnny Depp in the radical transformation stakes, playing Kenny Wells, down-on-his-luck hustler and modern-day prospector who goes sifting for gold in an uncharted Indonesian jungle.

Fresh from her high-heeled sprints in megahit Jurassic World, Howard came on board to play Wells’ long-time (and long-suffering) girlfriend, Kay, after Michelle Williams exited the project. Swapping her usual red locks for a frizzy blonde perm, she’s almost as unrecognisable as the Oscar-winning McConaughey, who will also be joined on his jungle jaunt by Carlos star Édgar Ramírez as a luckless geologist.

Shot in New York, New Mexico and Thailand, think Treasure Of The Sierra Madre meets American Hustle and you’re somewhere near this story, based around the 1993 Bre-X Mineral Corporation Scandal, when the Canadian firm lured investors towards a supposed enormous gold deposit find in Indonesia that later proved false.

While the script passed across the desks of both Michael Mann and Spike Lee at various points, it’s now being helmed by Stephen Gaghan, a director who has been so absent from our screens, he was missing presumed lost. The Oscar-winning screenwriter of Traffic, he also steered George Clooney to a golden statue for oil industry drama Syriana – his last feature film, now a decade old.

Since then, Gaghan has directed two little-seen TV movies and penned the script for videogame Call Of Duty: Ghosts but done little else. Gold seems a much shinier, ahem, prospect. At the Berlin Film Festival earlier this year, it sparked a bidding war – with The Weinstein Company snagging the US rights for a cool $15m. No word yet on whether Spandau Ballet are doing the theme tune, though. JM

ETA | 2016 Gold is expected to open next year.