Project after project has come to Brian De Palma‘s door with no signs of movement past some sort of initial agreement — something good enough to get the trades and blogs writing, at least — thus making it easy (or easier) to accept that the 76-year-old’s filmmaking days have come to an end. (Which would be okay by me — Passion makes for a hell of a last note.) Now, though, it might just be time to split that diopter: there’s a title that has a script, backers, stars, and a supposed starting window.
Variety tells us De Palma, Christina Hendricks, and Nikolaj Coster-Waldau (Game of Thrones) have come aboard Domino, from a script by Kon-Tiki‘s Petter Skavlan and with a summer start thanks to the international efforts of Backup, Maestranza, Schønne Film, and Zilvermeer. It sounds like a De Palma picture in the basic outline: a cop (Coster-Waldau) shirks duties to find his partner’s killer “while Europe is being targeted by terror attacks.” Hendricks’ fellow officer aides in the hunt, both ignorant of the fact that “the suspect they are chasing is working for a CIA operative and is on the trail of the ISIS cell behind the attacks.”
Comparisons to The French Connection have been made, though one immediately wonders if that’s more of a selling point than certainty. (Friedkin and De Palma aren’t exactly kindred artistic spirits, so my guess is: probably.) Which is all well and good, sure, but the prospect of at least one more De Palma film — speaking as someone who doesn’t think he’s lost it — works, no less when the man is hardly inclined to move forward with a movie unless he really enjoys the material. Although I read and report all of this with some caution, the pieces are in place; that’s more than we’ve been able to say about him in years.
While we wait for more, be sure to catch up with our career-spanning consideration of De Palma’s filmography.