Stephen King to direct instead of write, Thomas Jane to direct instead of act, Bryan Singer to be a Diva instead of direct. And The Coen Brothers are wonderful, as always.

Stephen King has not ruled out directing another movie. “I think it would be great, sometime when I wasn’t coked and drunk out of my mind, and see what came out”. He refers to 1986 horror/sci-fi/thriller/crapfest masala Maximum Overdrive, in which Emilio Estevez leads a group of humans trying to survive when “machines start to come alive and become homicidal”. To an AC/DC score composed under King’s supervision. At the time the Autopsy Room Four writer was sick of poor adaptations of his work … “If you want it done right, you have to do it yourself”. The film scores a 4.4 on IMDB.

Thomas Jane’s is shooting his directorial debut, The Dark Country, about “a couple who are forced to deal with a body in the desert making their honeymoon a hellish ride”. Furthermore, the Deep Blue Sea’s Jane has chosen to shoot the movie in 3D. His “great cast” includes Lauren German, for whom the New Mexico desert night shoots aren’t always comfortable: “[She’s] out there wearing next to nothing. She’s freezing for her art”. Art! To direct the epic, Jane (who once wrote a comic book entitled ‘Bad Planet’) turned down reprising his role in The Punisher: War Zone, being replaced by even-less-known Ray Stevenson, with Dominic West as a villain imaginatively named Jigsaw. Incidentally, the best moment in The Punisher never made it to screen; it was when Jane ‘accidentally’ stabbed Kevin Nash during a fight scene.

Bryan Singer violated Arnold Schwarzenegger’s no-fly-zone order by demanding to arrive by helicopter for Brandon Routh’s wedding. Quelle Diva. His Superman’s marriage to actress Courtney Ford took place at the El Capitan Ranch in Santa Barbara. The couple’s fortunes have changed somewhat: when they met four years ago, Routh was working at a Hollywood bowling alley, but has since headlined what was, at the time of release, the most expensive movie ever. He proposed at the 2006 Glastonbury Festival, which is known by attendees for having the dirtiest loos this side of Trainspotting.

I just wanted to report this cos it’s interesting. To make low-budget neo-noir masterpiece No Country For Old Men, the Coen Brothers (who have a 0.917 batting average), spent $800 a gallon on fake blood shipped from England. Joel explains “we had a lot of extras that had to lie around in the baking sun covered with blood on the desert floor for hours at a time … I wanted to know why they were [buying expensive blood] instead of just mixing food colouring with Karo syrup, which they usually do, and I was told this blood had no sugar in it … so [they extas] wouldn’t be attacked by creepy bugs and animals that might otherwise be attracted to sugar”.