Well this sorta thing just gives you headache doesn’t it?! Tom Cruise was originally the male lead in THE TOURIST and then he was replaced by Sam Worthington and his co-star was supposed to be Charlize Theron but she said sayonara and then Angelina Jolie stepped in, the initial director was Bharat Nalluri but then Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck (The Lives Of Others) was said to have gotten the job instead and now Worthington has exited the project and Johnny Depp signed on to replace him but Donnersmarck has decided to leave as well..
According to Variety, THE TOURIST is one project that can’t seem to keep hold of its stars, the article doesn’t say but I haven’t encountered a project where the stars just come and go as often as this in a long time. Turns out Worthington and Donnersmarck exited the project over ‘creative differences’
Nikki Finke says the producers thought Donnersmarck were too “difficult and demanding”. Hey, I wouldn’t expect anything less from an Oscar winning filmmaker. Producers need to back off a bit and let filmmakers do their job.
One of the directors interested in the project is Alfonso Cuaron (Prisoner of Azkaban) whose best movie to this day in my opinion was Y Tu Mama Tambien. No confirmation or deals have been locked in yet.
So how long do you give Depp before he decides to leave this project too? A week? A Month?
THE TOURIST is a thriller remake of a 2005 French thriller titled ANTHONY ZIMMER about an American tourist who finds his life in danger when a female Interpol agent uses him as a dupe to flush out an elusive criminal with whom she once had an affair. Originally scripted by Julian Fellowes, with rewrites by Christopher McQuarrie and Jeffrey Nachmanoff
THE TOURIST has been described to be in the same spirit as Hitchcock’s The Man Who Knew Too Much, Polanski’s Frantic and Morel’s Taken.
