If it wasn't already clear from my last three posts, I got the chance to spend the day talking with the stars and director of the upcoming Will Ferrell-Mark Wahlberg film The Other Guys. In addition to talking with writer/director Adam McKay and Wahlberg, I was granted an interview with the stunning Eva Mendes who was more than happy to give an update about her forthcoming features.
First up was Southbound, a film that Mendes has been attached to for a little over a year now. Co-starring Matthew McConaughey, the film was to be set on the US-Mexican border where McConaughey would play a border guard that gets caught up in the middle of a war between two Mexican crime families. Pay attention to the past tense in that sentence because this might be the last you hear about the film.
"No, I’m not doing that movie," said Mendes. "I wasn’t ever doing that movie." Mendes did go in for a meeting about the film, but despite Variety's claim that she was cast, it appears to be untrue. The film was meant to be helmed by Venezuelan director Jonathan Jakubowicz, but Mendes isn't even sure that the film is happening.
A film that is definitely happening, however, is Last Night, a film in which Mendes co-stars with Kiera Knightly and Sam Worthington. Made prior to the sale of Miramax, the film has been hanging in limbo waiting for the company to be purchased. Now that the company is close to finding a new owner, the film, according to Mendes, will finally start showing this fall, starting at the Rome Film Festival which opens this October.
"Massy Tadjedin, female writer/director, wrote and directed the film; Kiera is the best I’ve ever seen her; Sam Worthington is just so talented," Mendes said. "When we shot it last year he had just come off Avatar, it hadn’t come out yet, and off Terminator. He had done all these kind of high action, testosterone films and so we had him in a really interesting place... It’s a relationship drama, about the lives in infidelity and what is being faithful and what is being unfaithful and who pays in the end. It’s a very interesting film."
In the film, Mendes will play a co-worker of Worthington, with whom she gets embroiled in an affair kept secret from from Worthington's wife, played by Knightly. "We’re all the 'other' person," Mendes said.
Most recently, Mendes has been working on what she calls her passion project: an adaptation of the Nicholas Gage biography Greek Fire about famed opera singer Maria Callas. Set to play Callas in the film, which is currently being written by Julian Fellowes (Gosford Park), the film won't focus on Callas' singing career as much as it will look at her relationship with Greek shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis.
"It, to me, is a Greek tragedy and this book that Nick Gage wrote is incredibly detailed and he chronicles their romance in a way that is so interesting to me," Mendes said. "It’s not so much about her career as 'Callas.' It’s her relationship with one of the most powerful men in the world at the time. And it is something I’ve become extremely obsessed with."
