Paul Verhoeven is launching a new $ 35 million project, The Winter Queen, based on the novel Azazel by Russian bestselling writer Boris Akunin

Wednesday, June 26, 2019

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Paul Verhoeven, a celebrated US-based film director, who made the famous Basic Instinct, is launching a new $ 35 million project, The Winter Queen, based on the novel Azazel by Russian bestselling writer Boris Akunin. Mr. Verhoeven talked to Novye Izvestiia daily about the new film. According to the director, who has read many of Akunin's books, his detective stories are perfectly fit for screen adaptation, because of their dynamic plots and a charismatic character - detective genius Erast Fandorin. The new film features Fandorin as a young man - in his early twenties. Mr. Verhoeven, together with his longtime collaborator, screenwriter Gerard Soeteman, has already compiled a list of actors whom he want to audition for this role, including Leonardo Di Caprio and Jonathan Rhys-Meyers. The official casting, however, has not started yet. Russian actors will also take part. Verhoeven was advised to give a role to Vladimir Mashkov, who had played in Amercian movies and speaks good English. According to the director, Fandorin's adventures should be styled as a game, a detective story, solving riddles planted by the author. Therefore, he wants to make an elegant, thrilling film, resembling naive Tintin comics he liked so much when he was seven. Mr. Verhoeven wants the film to grip the audience, like James Bond does, so it will feature all the elements so attractive for the public: murders, a love story, mysteries, villains, femmes fatales, a sexy hero. The director thinks the result will be a postmodernist movie. Shooting will probably start next spring in St. Petersburg: Moscow, according to Mr. Verhoeven, lacks the stylish - somber and mysterious - unmistakably Russian atmosphere, which he deems absolutely necessary. This year the director is planning to visit the Moscow Film Festival. Apart from professional ones, he has another reason to come to Russia's capital - to see his daughter, who is currently staying in Moscow, and, as Mr. Verhoeven put it, "digging in the archives and studying the history of terrorism"

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