One film I’ve been waiting patiently to hear anything about is William Monahan’s London Boulevard starring Colin Farrell and Keira Knightley. Back in April the still you see to the right was released by GK Films as the first official image from the film and with it a blog post stated it was in “the final stages of post production.” Well, it’s been five months since it was in those final stages and still no word… until about four days ago.
Jamie Campbell Bower (Sweeney Todd, The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn – Part 2), who stars as a character named White Boy in the film, tweeted, “Just did adr for London Boulevard. Strange going back to being a rude boi after being king for 3 months.” What’s strange is to think Monahan is still working on the film after being in the final stages of post five months ago. As for Bower’s reference to “being king,” he’s currently working on the upcoming Starz TV series “Camelot” in which he stars as King Arthur.
London Boulevard reportedly completed principal photography in August of 2009 and will serve as Monahan’s directorial debut following his Oscar-winning screenplay for Scorsese’s The Departed, but something must be up. Smart thinking would have presumed the film would have landed in Toronto looking for a buyer, but with Monahan still tooling around in post means it obviously wouldn’t have been ready. Originally I thought GK Films was just holding off because they didn’t want to have another crime romance competing with their just released The Town this Fall, but I guess it was something else.
The film is based on a novel by Ken Bruen and features Farrell as a South London criminal who, after release from prison, tries to give up the gangster life by becoming a handyman for a reclusive young actress (Knightley). David Thewlis, Anna Friel, Ben Chaplin, Eddie Marsan, Sanjeev Baskhar, newcomer Jamie Campbell Bower and Ray Winstone co-star.
I’ve had the script on my desktop for a long time but not being much of a script reader before seeing the film I haven’t cracked it open yet. Perhaps I should because at this rate there’s no telling when we’ll see it. It also makes me wonder when Monahan is going to find the time to script Joseph Kosinski’s Oblivian for Disney, which he was attached to last week.
