With his critically praised ballet thriller (yes, you read that right: ballet thriller) Black Swan about to get a wide release, Darren Aronofsky is back in the spotlight, and speculation has been building as to what his next project will be. A number of studios have been courting the director for projects as diverse as Robocop, Preacher, the Superman reboot (which just went to Zack Snyder), Tales From The Gangster Squad, and the X-Men Origins: Wolverine sequel, but now it appears Aronofsky has decided to move ahead on a completely different kind of genre film.
In an interview with Quien, screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga (Babel, Amores Perros) revealed that Aronofsky actually plans to begin scouting locations next month for The Tiger, a project we reported the two were working on back in May, the true story of Russian game warden Yuri Trush, who in 1997 set out to track and kill the tiger that had been terrorizing a nearby town in Eastern Russia. Arriaga’s adaptation, based on John Vaillant’s non-fiction book of the same name, would likely star Brad Pitt opposite the highly intelligent and vicious animal. According to the interview, the film could begin shooting as early as next year.
While it would have been exciting to see Aranofsky helm any one of the previously mentioned titles (and he still could – nothing’s for sure), I’m pretty excited for The Tiger, a project that should be well suited to Aranofsky’s smart, stark, and surreal aesthetic style. Does such a groundbreaking filmmaker really need to waste his time on an X-Men spinoff movie? No. And Brad Pitt’s on board, people!
From Amazon, a description of The Tiger that makes it sound like a Russian Jaws. Read on and get psyched:
When Yuri Trush was called in to investigate an attack by a Siberian tiger, what he found was unlike anything he’d ever encountered. Nothing remained of the victim but stumps of bone protruding from his boots. Even more chilling was the evidence that this attack had been carefully orchestrated, as if the tiger was seeking revenge. Before long, the beast struck again, and Trush, leader of a tiger conservation unit, found himself forced to hunt this animal through the brutal cold of a Siberian winter, becoming intimately acquainted with the tiger’s history, motives, and unique method of attack—until their harrowing final encounter.
Source: SlashFilm
