Because the studio was making a very generous, if utterly doomed, attempt at an Oscar campaign for her role in Conviction, I actually got to meet Juliette Lewis last December, at a holiday party thrown by Fox Searchlight. Aside from Sam Rockwell, whose Oscar campaign for the film also went nowhere, she really was the best thing in the movie, appropriately unhinged and hilarious as the ultimate unreliable witness in the legal case at the center of the movie. The Oscar nomination was probably never going to happen-- too small a role in a movie that made little impact-- but it reminded anyone who saw it that Lewis is still tremendously talented, same as her role in Whip It a year or two ago as well.
And happily, casting agents also got the message-- according to Variety, Lewis has been cast in two different indies, starting with Derick Martini's Hick in March then moving on to shoot Single Shot later in the spring. Hick already stars an enormous number of up-and-comers, including Chloe Moretz, Eddie Redmayne and Blake Lively; Lewis's role isn't describe, but given that the film stars Moretz as a girl who runs away from her neglectful mom, I wouldn't be surprised to see Lewis stepping into the mother role.
As for Single Shot, which David Rosenthal is directing, Lewis will join a cast that already includes Alessandro Nivola, William H. Macy, Juno Temple and Emily Mortimer. It's unclear what role Lewis will play, but the story itself is a very Coen Brothers-esque crime plot about a man who accidentally kills a woman on a hunting trip, then happens to come upon a bag of money and the killer who wants it. I'm just hoping Lewis doesn't play the woman who's killed, since the more she appears in a given movie, the better off we all are.
