Now this sounds exciting. The Hollywood Reporter tells us that Natalie Portman has signed on to star in Jane Got a Gun, a Western written by Brian Duffield that topped the ‘Black List’ of unproduced screenplays. Lynne Ramsay – director of last year’s sensational We Need To Talk About Kevin – is attached to direct. The project has sparked a bidding war at the Cannes Film Festival, where it’s being shopped around to foreign financiers and LA-based studios.
According to THR: “Jane Got a Gun centers on a woman whose outlaw husband returns home barely alive and riddled with bullet wounds. She is forced to reach out to an ex-lover and ask if he will help defend her farm when her husband’s gang eventually tracks him down to finish the job.”
With nothing but a script, a star, and a director to go on, the project must seem pretty impressive if multiple sources are vying for the rights to produce it. Personally, Portman and Ramsay alone are enough to get me psyched for the finished product.
Portman has done solid work for her entire career, but her Oscar-winning turn in Darren Aronofsky‘s Black Swan remains one of the most piercing, impressive performances in recent memory, and I’m anxious for her to return to dramas that truly test her talents. Ramsay is exactly the director to that. She’s one of the strongest voices working in film and just as she propelled Tilda Swinton to career-best work in We Need To Talk About Kevin, I expect her to do great things with Portman.
We’ll see how the project comes together in the months ahead.
