Like everyone else in the movie world right now (apart from us: we're in a pokey coffee shop eating a stale croissant. Yum) Gerard Butler is in Cannes and he's doing what any self respecting movie star does whilst there: plug upcoming projects.
First up he talks about the White House invasion project that will be competing with Roland Emmerich's White House Down, Olympus Has Fallen: “That’s not yet confirmed, but the story is really fun. North Korean terrorists come down the Mall in a bloody cargo plane and also attack the White House from the inside. It’s insane, but you buy it, you go with it. It’s action-packed all the way through - a traditional, classic, unapologetic, big action movie. It’s Die Hard in the White House.”
Er, that's pretty similar to Emmerich's film then, but the sounds of it. Another of his projects is the Joel Silver production, Motor City, in which he'll star opposite Gary Oldman: “That’s more like French Connection: down, dirty and extremely violent", he said. "It’s me going head to head with Gary. I don’t know him well, but I met him many years ago, when I was first starting out, and he was very, very kind to me.”
And there's more! He then went onto talk about Thunder Run, being directed by Simon West, which will see him star opposite Matthew McConaughey and Sam Worthington: “It’s about the initial attack on Baghdad, as US troops went in with a column of tanks called the Thunder Run", he revealed, "and it’s going to be done like Avatar. My face and body will be recorded with little cameras and everything else will be CGI, painted in in the background. I’ve never read a script with more action, more explosions, more violence. If you didn’t do it like this, it would cost $300 million. I saw a three-minute test-piece and it blew my balls off.”
His commitment to the action genre is clearly to be commended. You can read about these projects in the full interview, over at Empire.
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