Brian De Palma To Direct Thriller ‘The Key Man’
The last decade hasn’t been the most popular one forBrian De Palma, at least in a commerical sense. I do love his 2003 movieFemme Fatalea whole hell of a lot, but can’t really get behind the James Ellroy adaptationThe Black Dahlia, and feel like the minor Iraq War filmRedactedmight be worth a second look at some point in the future, if only because it was a relatively early effort to embrace the always-on nature of modern video.
But now it’s a whole new decade, and the director has been working to line up a couple of possible projects. We’ve heard hemight remakeAlain Corneau’sCrime d’amour(Love Crime) as a film calledPassion, for example. Now it seems as if he has money lined up for another project, a thriller calledThe Key Man, which will shoot by the end of this year.
Deadlinesays the film is written byJoby Harold(Army of the Dead, a rewrite onAll You Need is Kill) and follows “a single father who’s targeted by U.S. government agents because his body contains answers to important national secrets.” The report also says the style of the script calls upon classic ’70s paranoid thrillers likeThree Days of the CondorandMarathon Man. (The latter being one of my fave ’70s thrillers.)
If you’re out of the loop with respect to De Palma, check out Criterion’s wonderful recent blu-ray ofBlow Out, which is one of the director’s best films and also one of the earlier movies to make extensive use of the Steadicam. (Steadicam inventor Garrett Brown came to work for De Palma not long after finishingThe Shiningwith Kubrick.) And Netflix is streaming his early filmThe Fury, as well asDressed to Kill,The Black DahliaandFemme Fatale. Do giveFemme Fatalea chance; it is so exuberantly in love with being a movie that its energy becomes really infectious.
