Female-driven western 'Jane Got a Gun' secures financing

Since her Best Actress win for Black Swan in 2010, Natalie Portman hasn't played another meaty role, instead appearing in blockbusters like Thor, the romantic comedy No Strings Attached, and the stoner comedy Your Highness. She's wrapped work on a Terrence Malick project, but chances are that
performance won't be seen for some time. Her next big appearance may be in Jane Got a Gun, a western that will film early next year. Portman would both star and produce. The production just secured financing, and the sales agents will be looking for buyers at the Toronto Film Festival in a few weeks.

Portman would play a woman who has to ask her ex-lover for help in order to save her current husband, an outlaw. The husband comes home riddled with bullets, almost on his deathbed, and a gang of Confederate soldiers is after him to finish the job. That forces Portman's character to seek out her ex, who can help her defend the family farm. It had been reported that Michael Fassbender was considering playing the role of the ex, but those rumors were later squashed.

Lynne Ramsay (We Need to Talk About Kevin) is directing, making this truly a female-driven picture. There really aren't many films to draw on for comparison. Civil War and farm-set Cold Mountain comes to mind, but I see more differences than similarities. Though the western genre has long since passed its heyday, the right kind of project can bring people back, like 3:10 to Yuma or the more contemporary No Country for Old Men, for example. With a farm wife starring in what's normally a cowboy picture, Jane Got a Gun may be just that.

Director Terrence Malick suddenly prolific, with three movies in queue

By Sarah Sluis

After waiting years for writer/director Terrence Malick's The Tree of Life, I was a bit underwhelmed when it came out this May. What's wrong with a little narrative? Even so, Malick remains my favorite working director. No one else captures (or even cares about!) natural imagery the way he does. His films are like watching a "Planet Earth" that's subsumed to the narrative of the humans around the creatures and vistas.

Malick is famously private and refuses to give interviews to the press. Until The Tree of Life, he also had a perfect track record (at least in my book). Given how few films he's created, I suspect he's a perfectionist. I wonder if mixed opinions about his latest work somehow freed him from a fear of failure, because he now has three projects in the works.

The first has already filmed and supposedly will be edited by 2012 (though Malick is a notoriously slow editor, often using the cutting room to transform the work).Today, the Los Angeles Times was able to scrounge up details about the plot. Ben Affleck stars as a philanderer who goes to Paris, encounters a European woman (Olga Kurylenko) and brings her home, marrying her for visa reasons. With the romance fizzling, he takes up with a hometown girl (Rachel McAdams) with whom he has a history. Javier Bardem plays a priest Affleck's character consults about his raffish ways.

Malick's other two projects will shoot back-to-back in 2012. Lawless stars Ryan Gosling, Christian Bale, Cate Blanchett, Rooney Mara and Haley Bennett, who may be Malick's latest ingnue (he has cast unknowns such as Sissy Spacek and Jessica Chastain in the past). Knight of Cups, the second project, will also star Bale and Blanchett, though the movies reportedly do not relate to each other. That picture would also star Isabel Lucas, another young, relatively unknown actress.

None of the pictures has a U.S. distributor, though FilmNation has been serving as a sales rep and production company. Malick has reportedly already received offers for the first movie, though he has turned them down--an enviable position to be in. Let's hope his first movie squeezes into the end-of-year 2012 releases, but knowing Malick, such an optimistic timeline will be a longshot.