Around The World In 80 Days - Jackie Chan, Kathy Bates, Arnold Schwarzenegger, etc..

[dh1989]

I read this on The Arnold Fans! today......

Today Variety reports that Arnold Schwarzenegger and John Cleese have signed to play cameo roles in Walden Media's Around the World in 80 Days. The film will reteam Schwarzenegger with his Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines producer Hal Lieberman, who is producing "80 Days" with Bill Badalato.

"Around the World", which started shooting March 13 in Thailand, moved to Studio Babelsberg in Germany this month for a three-month shoot.

Kathy Bates recently came on board to play Queen Victoria in the film in which she's starring opposite Jackie Chan, Steve Coogan, Jim Broadbent, Johnny Knoxville and Belgian thesp Cecile de France for helmer Frank Coraci. Michael D. Weiss and David Titcher adapted the story based on Jules Verne's novel set during the 19th century.

This sounds very promising. I, sadly, have not read the novel, but the title's cool, and you can't beat the cast. What do you schmoes think?

[Tom Samborski]

I'll have to make judgement after I see a trailer, but right now I want to see it just because of Arnold's cameo. He also has a cameo in The Rock's Welcome To The Jungle as well.

[XCoRyX]

whats the story of this?

[movies35]

It will be awesome... as long as Cathy Bates isn't nude in it.

[dh1989]

Originally posted by movies35
It will be awesome... as long as Cathy Bates isn't nude in it.

Did you see About Schmidt (9/10)? She was barely nude, except for a quick butt shot. And it is still a great film.

XCoryX, here is the plot....

"In this story, an Englishman named Phileas Fogg bets that he can travel completely around the world in only eighty days. In this humorous and fun story he encounters exotic places, cultures, and situations that can cause him serious trouble. Can he actually make it around the world? And can it be done in eighty days?"

I think the only real big change'll be that Phileas Fogg'll be Asian (played by Chan) instead of English.

EDIT NOTE - Oops, I was wrong! Phileas will be played by an Englishman, not Chan. My mistake..... :)

[movies35]

Originally posted by dh1989
Did you see About Schmidt (9/10)? She was barely nude, except for a quick butt shot. And it is still a great film.

XCoryX, here is the plot....

"In this story, an Englishman named Phileas Fogg bets that he can travel completely around the world in only eighty days. In this humorous and fun story he encounters exotic places and cultures and situations that can ground him. Can he actually make it around the world? And can it be done in this eighty days?"

I think the only real big change'll be that Phileas Fogg'll be Asian (played by Chan) instead of English.

Dude! I was just joking! And yes I loved AS 9.5/10. I thought she was the funniest part of the movie.

[dh1989]

Originally posted by movies35
Dude! I was just joking! And yes I loved AS 9.5/10. I thought she was the funniest part of the movie.

I know. Your message just brought back memories. I used to get angry when people said dumb shit like "I don't wanna go see About Schmidt because I'll throw up when I see Kathy Bates naked." I know you're not like that.

[dh1989]

Here is tons of information from ABOUT about this film (;)).......

When we met Jackie Chan for The Tuxedo, he told us he was preparing to make Around the World in 80 Days, but that was all we could get from him. So, to find out more about the intriguing Jules Verne remake, I called up director Frank Coraci to find out more. Coraci was gracious enough to take my call and fill us in on the details of his project. Principal photography will begin in January, and the production team is scouting locations around the world and building sets now. The movie will make use of some locations and some soundstage work, with a little bit of blue screen.

"We're going to be shooting a lot of the movie in Thailand and Berlin, but we'll also be bouncing around everywhere from China, the Great Wall, to Paris, London, going to quite a few places," Coraci said. "Of course, to get period Paris and period London and period San Francisco, a lot of that will be created with amazing visual effects."

Coraci comes from the world of Adam Sandler comedies and Around the World in 80 Days will be his first action film, unless you count the tackles in The Waterboy. To prepare for the action, Coraci is "spending a lot of time with Jackie, which is just an amazing experience. When I thought of using him for this role, I always was a big Jackie fan, and the more I started to talk to him, he told me about some other movies I hadn't seen, so I really dug into his Hong Kong movies. I was basically blown away, because I feel like I'm lucky enough to work with really a film legend. When you look at his body of work, he's changed the whole martial arts thing and made it into a comedic [genre] but still keeping the martial arts integrity and doing amazing martial arts. To me, he's like today's Buster Keaton or Charlie Chaplin with a whole new spin. He's done something totally different. So, we spent a lot of time hanging out and just checking out some of his older movies and then we'll come up with ideas. I'll think of something and he'll say, 'No, I did that. What if we do it this way?' Then we'll just kind of bounce ideas around. The trickiest thing with Jackie and with the writers is we're always like, 'What hasn't he done? Climbing a Ferris Wheel?' No, he's done that. 'Fighting a giant squid.' That, he hasn't done. It's searching for some of those things that he's never done, because that's part of what ignites him too."

Don't get your hopes up for that squid battle though. "I think we may have killed it now because we don't want to go too over the top. There isn't now, but there is some other fun stuff. I think we'll get him to do a few things he hasn't done before."

Chan will play Passepartout, the role played by Cantinflas in the 1956 film of Around the World. A few things will have to change to make Passepartout a Jackie Chan role, and to make the story a vehicle for Chan's action set pieces.

"First of all, not many people could fill the role of Cantinflas and outdo him. But, also, we've seen Jackie in so many scenarios in his body of work and all his great movies, but this movie gives him the chance to do what Jackie does best everywhere. In front of the Taj Mahal, at the Great Wall, in an art gallery in France with a bunch of impressionist painters. We just get to really bring it around the world. If anyone is an international star, it's Jackie and this movie, the whole mode of this movie is about travel. It's about connecting the world together and there are not many actors that unite the world. You can go anywhere in the world and people flip out when they see Jackie Chan. So, in a way he is the perfect representative to glue this movie together."

Coraci could not say yet who would be Chan's costar in the role of Phileas Fogg. "I want to hold off on that because we have lots of people in mind and we're just at the point where we're going out to them."

Could Adam Sandler have a cameo? "Not to be disclosed yet, but there will be a lot of cameos in the movie. It's that kind of movie where they pop up in different places."

Look for more in my next post!

[dh1989]

Jackie Chan has been public about his dislike for his American films, as the action is brief and simple compared to his complex Hong Kong work. Coraci is confident he'll be able to make Chan happy with Around the World in 80 Days.

"I've been spending a lot of time with him to make sure everything I do, he likes," Coraci said. "When he says he's not happy with his American films, I think he means that he doesn't quite understand, like with Rush Hour, he doesn't quite understand all the humor. That's what I think he means by that. So, part of the thing we're going to do is we're trying to make a very world-friendly movie. The great thing about Jackie is to me, even in his American films, his comedy is just universal and he is quite a comedic genius. So, I think some humor never crosses the international lines because it doesn't translate, but Jackie and his reaction shots and the fun he has and just that Buster Keaton quality, to me, transcends to any culture."

Around the World in 80 Days will play on a language barrier of a different kind. In this story, Passepartout is hiding out as Phileas Fogg's French valet, and so Chan will have to pretend to speak French. "That's part of the fun is Phileas is not a very worldly guy because he never leaves his home because he's always inventing and feels like there's no reason to travel or do anything. He lives in his own mind so he's sort of an eccentric inventor. There's quite a few times where it comes up where Jackie's character, Passepartout has to speak French, and a lot of comedy is mined out of the fact that he has to sort of make up gibberish French. You'll have a French clerk in subtitles saying, 'You imbecile, you do not even know French.' A lot of the fun comes from him hiding the fact that he's really not French from Phileas."

But of course, there will be elaborate fight scenes as well. "It's funny, me and Jackie were talking. I watched so many of his movies and I watched his documentary, My Stunts. A martial arts fight is fun to watch but what's really fun to watch is a guy getting thrown down the stairs, rolling down three flights, hitting a table and smashing it. He and his guys do that so well that we created a character, sort of like these villains, these Chinese Men from the evil Fang, but from the novel we took Detective Fix and he's sort of a skinny cockneyed guy, a crooked cop who's trying to stop Fogg and Passepartout on their journey. He's modeled after Wile E. Coyote. In a very cartoon kind of way, this guy gets thrown out of trains, thrown through walls, trampled on, run over. Just when you think he's had enough, he gets it again. He ends up being a really fun character that you'll actually end up rooting for. But I just keyed into the fact that martial arts is really fun to watch but the guy getting beat up is even more fun to watch if you do it in a comical slapsticky kind of way."

As Coraci moves toward production, he has already ordered several drafts of a script, and he explained what each writer has brought to the project. "I work very closely in the development in the movies that I've done. We've had such a slew [of writers]. David Titcher is just such a great guy and such a history buff, that a lot of what happens in this movie is they stumble across historical people. He was one of the earlier ones on who helped me shape the stuff where we took the original and put the spin on it. And then it's such a big movie that it's like an endless amount of ideas. So, David Titcher brought some of the real historical stuff and he just had a good sense that I wanted to make a movie that I never forgot as a kid, so the inventor stuff lends itself to gadgets and stuff like that, things that I loved when I was a kid from James Bond to Our Man Flint to even Doc Savage or Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. Then a few different friends of mine over the years, who I went to NYU with who get my sense of humor, Steven Peros did a great job with me for a while. Now I have David Banillo and David Goldstein, more friends of mine from NYU. So, it's sort of like because it's such a big movie, there's so much rich stuff to bring to the table, that it's an endless supply of ideas. So, we get to one point and we'd be like, 'All right, let's bring in somebody else. They'll have a bunch of new fresh ideas.' So, the movie really is chock full of places to go and chock full of just fun, fun funny scenes."

Around the World in 80 Days is shooting for a Christmas 2003 release.

[movies35]

Originally posted by dh1989
I know. Your message just brought back memories. I used to get angry when people said dumb shit like "I don't wanna go see About Schmidt because I'll throw up when I see Kathy Bates naked." I know you're not like that.

I know that was really stupid.

[Cunning Visions]

I hope this movie turns out well....but I'm starting to have flashbacks of the Cannonball Run films