Source:Edward Douglas

August 12, 2007

ComingSoon.net has spoken to actor Clive Owen and Paul Giamatti numerous times in the last few years, but not even Nostradamus could have foreseen that these two very different actors would one day be starring in a film together, let alone on opposite sides of a gun battle in Michael Davis' appropriately-titled Shoot 'Em Up. We had a chance to talk to both of them about the movie, and at the same time, we asked about some of their upcoming projects.

"I'm producing and hoping to star in this Marlowe project about Raymond Chandler's Phillip Marlowe," Owen told us about the project announced earlier this year. "We got the rights and we're developing the script, and there's an area that's very daunting because the greats have played him: Mitchum and Bogart. I won't be going in there trying to do so something I think that relates to them. You go in there with a fresh approach, so I never really worry about the history of a project, like I wouldn't do 'The Big Sleep' but you go in and I'll do my interpretation of Marlowe and hope it comes even with the same radar as Bogart's."

After Shoot 'Em Up, Owen can be seen in Elizabeth: The Golden Age, a very different movie, playing a very different character, that being writer-explorer Sir Walter Raleigh. "He was an absolutely extraordinary character, and I was a huge fan of 'Elizabeth'," he explained. "The whole team came back: Shekhar Kapur, Cate (Blanchett), Geoffrey Rush, and it's a fantastic script and a wonderful part. There's a whole element of it that centers on the love triangle between Elizabeth, Raleigh and Bess, the lady-in-waiting. They were known to have a very, very close relationship and this is about setting up a situation where maybe in another time, another place, the whole thing could have become different. It's really about Elizabeth and her destiny and heading to become the immortal virgin Queen and struggling with that really."

He didn't take too seriously the early buzz for the movie being a frontrunner at the Oscars, despite not having been seen by anybody yet. "I think it's hilarious when they start saying that people are up for Oscars and no one has even seen the film. It's a bit scary really, because it's saying, 'Well that's obviously an Oscar part, and that isn't an Oscar part' and they haven't even seen the movie." He didn't think it could jinx the movie's chances but did think it was "slightly crazy" to start talking about Oscars before anyone had seen it.

After making an appearance to support the film at the Toronto Film Festival in September, Owen will get right into shooting The International, the next film from German mastermind Thomas Tykwer, which he told us a little about as well. "It's like a big international, political thriller with a guy trying to expose and bring down a big bank, and every time he gets close, people are backing off, and strange things are happening with people being murdered, and he's obsessively trying to bring them down. It's like a throwback '70s very political thriller with some amazing bursts of action in there as well."

And as far as whether he knew any more about Sin City 2 than anyone else involved whom we've spoken to: "If there's a start date, I'm not in it," he joked, although he has no worries, since Frank Miller has put it on the backburner to move forward on Will Eisner's The Spirit.

As for the actor playing Owen's arch-nemesis in Shoot 'Em Up, Paul Giamatti talked to us about the Philip K. Dick biopic that he's been attached to with an update on that project. "His daughters are probably going to help produce it, and there's a guy writing it right now as far as I know. I'd love to do it, if they still want me to do it when it comes around and it's all done, I'd absolutely love to do it. Definitely. We'll see what the guy comes up with."

Shoot 'Em Up opens nationwide on Friday, September 7. Elizabeth: The Golden Age opens on October 12. Look for full interviews with Owen and Giamatti in the coming month.

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