Ang Lee in talks to direct action thriller ‘Gemini Man’
AN action movie project that has remained one of Hollywood’s most fabled unproduced films for over 20 years is getting another shot at the big screen.
Two-time Oscar-winning Taiwanese American director Ang Lee is in discussions to direct the science-fiction actioner ‘Gemini Man’ for Skydance — a project that’s been in the works for two decades.
Skydance picked up the rights to the project last year. Jerry Bruckheimer is producing and Don Murphy is executive producing. Lee’s rep stressed that the discussions are at an early stage and that official contract negotiations have not yet started.
Lee’s most recent film was ‘The Long Halftime Walk of Billy Lynn’, for which he used an unprecedented shooting and projection frame rate of 120 frames per second — five times faster than the normal rate of 24 frames per second. He won Academy Awards for directing ‘Brokeback Mountain’ and ‘Life of Pi’ and was nominated for ‘Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon’.
In 2009, the late Curtis Hanson had been attached to direct from a script by David Benioff, in which an ageing NSA agent tries to retire and is targeted for death. He then discovers his assassin is a younger cloned version of himself.
‘Gemini Man’ was first set up at Disney in 1997 as a pitch by Darren Lemke, with Murphy producing and Tony Scott directing. Lee is repped by CAA. In another development, Ang Lee has been ranked 10th on the 2017 list of the 21st Century’s Top 100 Directors compiled by film website TSPDT (They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They?).
To qualify among the 100 most critically acclaimed filmmakers of the 21st Century, each director (or directing team) needs to have a minimum of two films released between 2000-2016 and to be cited in TSPDT’s list of Top 1,000 Films of the 21st Century, according to TSPDT.
Lee made the number 10 spot on the list, with four of his films included on the top 1,000 films list.