The Tourist
 Johnny Depp will star with Angelina Jolie in The Tourist, a thriller in the Hitchcock mold to be directed by Oscar-winning German filmmaker Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck. Graham King’s GK Films and Spyglass Entertainment will produce The Tourist, which will be released by Sony. The Tourist is an adaptation of the 2005 French film Anthony Zimmer, written and directed by Jerome Salle, which starred Sophie Marceau and Yvan Attal. Angelina Jolie will play an Interpol agent who draws an unwitting tourist, played by Johnny Depp, into her attempt to locate a criminal who was once her lover. The criminal has had extensive plastic surgery, so no one really knows what he looks like now . . . and it probably won’t be long before the innocent bystander is mistaken for the master criminal. Yes, this sounds reminiscent of Cary Grant’s Roger Thornhill being mistaken for spy George Kaplan in Hitchcock’s brilliant North by Northwest, perhaps the best romantic suspense film ever made.  But don’t expect to see Johnny Depp chased by a crop-duster or Johnny and Angelina scrambling up the face of Mount Rushmore; The Tourist will film in spring 2010 among the landmarks and canals of Venice. According to the casting agency, as many as 1,000 extras will be needed for scenes in Piazza San Marco, at the Rialto market, and in a palace overlooking the Grand Canal.
The talent involved in The Tourist is impressive indeed. Producer Graham King won the Oscar for Best Picture in 2007 for Martin Scorsese’s The Departed, and received a Best Picture nomination in 2004 for The Aviator. Director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck won an Academy Award in 2007 for Best Foreign Language Film for his writing/directing debut The Lives of Others. Johnny Depp has received three Oscar nominations for Best Actor and eight Best Actor Golden Globe nominations, including a win for Sweeney Todd. Angelina Jolie won the Oscar as Best Supporting Actress in 2000 for Girl, Interrupted, and was nominated as Best Actress in 2009 for The Changeling. Costume designer Colleen Atwood has received seven Oscar nominations, winning twice, for Chicago (2002) and Memoirs of a Geisha (2005).
 In an interview with Steve “Frosty” Weintraub of Collider.com, Graham King described how he became involved with The Tourist, and how he persuaded Johnny Depp to join the project. One day, said King, he received a call from Gary Barber at Spyglass Entertainment, who suggested King might be interested in The Tourist. “And I read it and I saw a movie--I saw a great movie. And I watched the original, Anthony Zimmer, the French movie and really liked that.” Angelina Jolie was already attached to the project: “[She]really wanted to play this role and work with Florian, who obviously did The Lives of Others and has got a lot of talent.”
 The next step for the producer was bringing Johnny Depp on board. “I [. . .] sent Johnny the script and I said, ‘I think this will be really a great role for you.’ And I went over to see him and we spoke about it, and he read it, and he saw the original, and he said, ‘I love it.’ And he said, ‘It’s really, really special.’” Adds King, with obvious enthusiasm, “All of a sudden I’ve got Johnny Depp and Angelina Jolie in a movie, you know? Which is a really fun feeling, right?”
“I think that’s one you’ll be on the set of,” Weintraub said, and King replied, “Every day. [. . .] Me and 300,000 paparazzi.”
Filming is scheduled to begin at the end of February 2010 and to continue to May. The Tourist is due for release in 2011. --Part-Time Poet
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