Un film de Michael Winterbottom

Frankly, I'm not sure the director cares one way or the other what people think of his films, so long as he gets to do what he wants to do. And once a movie's finished, he doesn't look back. Indeed, he is already putting together his next project, a political thriller set in Palestine in 1948 called The Promised Land, starring Jim Sturgess, Matthew Macfadyen and Colin Firth.

Q. What is next for you?
Michael Winterbottom: [...] We’re also trying to do a film in October set in Palestine in the ’30s [The Promised Land] with Jim Sturgess playing a British policeman, and Colin Firth chasing a right-wing Jewish terrorist. We’ll film that in Israel because it’s set in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem.

But right now, we're wanting to do a film set in Palestine in the 1930's about British police chasing Jewish terrorist groups. There's a guy called Avraham Stern, who was one of the leaders of the Jewish underground from when Britain was controlling Palestine, so it's set in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem and it's about police trying to capture Stern and Stern trying to kill the police. It's based on a true story.

CS: Are you going to try to shoot that there?
Winterbottom: Yeah, yeah.

CS: Have you ever shot there before?
Winterbottom: No, I haven't. We've been working on the story for that for a couple years, so last year, we went out to look at locations and we've cast the English police parts, that's Jim Sturgess, Matthew MacFadyen and Colin Firth, so they're the three main English guys, but we haven't cast the Jewish parts yet.

CS: Is that based on a book? (There's a MAJOR SPOILER for the movie in the following response.)
Winterbottom: No, we did quite a lot of research, it's based on two policemen called (Thomas) Wilkin (played by Sturgess) and (Geoffrey) Morton (played by MacFadyen), real policemen, so we just did our own research on that, and as I say, they're chasing this guy called Stern who is one of the leaders of the underground. They ended up catching Stern and killing him, and then two years later, one of the policemen was assassinated, so weirdly, we have at the end of the film, we have an interview, which we've already done with one of the people who assassinated Wilkin, who is still alive, two of them in fact, so we have them talking about how they assassinated Wilkin already, so it's a great story.

L'autore di Road to Guantanamo ora sta lavorando a un nuovo progetto, "Un film ambientato in Palestina nel 1930 sulla polizia britannica alla caccia di un gruppo di terroristi ebrei e tratto da una storia vera - ha detto a Cinecittà News - La storia ruota attorno a Avraham Stern, uno dei leader dell'underground ebreo da cui l'Inghilterra controllava la Palestina. Lo gireremo a Tel Aviv, dove la polizia cerca di catturare Sterb e lui di uccidere i poliziotti". Nei ruoli dei poliziotti inglesi ci saranno Jim Sturgess e Colin Firth e una parte della pellicola, dal titolo The Promised Land, potrebbe essere girata nel Sud Italia, dice ancora Winterbottom. "Ma in questo momento siamo bloccati, non riusciamo a chiudere i finanziamenti, probabilmente per la delicatezza dell'argomento".