Writer/director James Toback is looking to make a new movie; a film focusing “on the idea of the self,” as the filmmaker revealed during an event for The Artist earlier this week. [L.A. Times]
He dug deeper into the idea:
“If I say, ‘I’m James Toback,’ what does that mean? I could just as easily be walking over there and saying, ‘I’m Harold Lerner.’ I could go to a second country with a different identity.”
He’s hoping to direct the film this summer in Cannes in the south of France.
Toback has been in the movie business for a long, tumultuous period of time. Once an NYU professor with a vicious gambling addiction, Toback made a splash in the literary world with his controversial Jim Brown biography, then a splash in early 70s Hollywood with his script The Gambler, a film about an NYU professor with a vicious gambling addiction. The film was directed by Karel Reisz and starred James Caan, becoming a staple of the New Hollywood era of American filmmaking. There’s been talk of it being remade.
What followed for Toback was a mixed career as writer/director and writer for higher-profile filmmakers, including Warren Beatty and Barry Levinson (Toback drafted Levinson and Beatty’s superb gangster film Bugsy in 1991. He’s also writing Levinson’s Gotti film). His most recent film was the acclaimed 2008 Mike Tyson documentary Tyson.
In many ways, Toback’s been making films about the struggle with the self ever since the beginning. Fingers, his directorial debut, starred Harvey Keitel as a young pianist who’s also a strong man for his gangster father. Black and White was his decidedly uneven observation on racism in America. If there’s a filmmaker out there willing to fight for the funding to make a film about separate identities in one person,it’s James Toback.
Have you seen Toback’s films? What do you think of him as a filmmaker?