Empire Online
Connery And Caine - Together Again?
24th June 2003
It's
been almost thirty years since Sean Connery and Michael Caine shared a
screen in The Man Who Would Be King, but if
actor/director Bill Paxton has his way it won't be long before they team
up again.
Talking to Paxton this week about the release on DVD of his directorial debut, Frailty, Empire Online discovered that he has a cunning plan to bring the British icons together for a romantic comedy. ’I'm working on a great British romantic comedy to team up Sean Connery and Michael Caine,' he told us. 'It's called Doug and Dave and it's a real Midsummer's Night Dream telling of two painters from Wiltshire who started the crop circle hoax in the Seventies.
' I really will only make it if I can get those two actors,' he added. 'They're born to play these roles and I've so admired their work in The Man Who Would Be King. I know they're great friends, but I can't go to them with my cap in my hand - I've got to have a deal set up. But that would be my dream project.'
Having just won a Saturn award for Frailty, Paxton has his pick of a number of projects to choose as his follow-up film. 'I've teamed up with Bill Aldridge's son who owns the film rights to Whatever Happened to Baby Jane. A great writer did a reworking of the Baby Jane story - instead of two ageing starlets this is two brothers who are ex-professional boxers where the younger brother's having to take care of the older brother who has boxer's dementia. But it's a well-written script and it would be a great book-end to Frailty. But I don't necessarily want to get lost in that [horror] genre.'
The other one is a Frank Capra-style movie called Henry Allgood Must Die. 'It's about a doctor who comes back to a village where his father who was the village doctor has passed away. He decides to take over his father's practice but gets into a philosophical/moral debate with this millionaire patriarch who's dying. It's one where the tables get turned on this young doctor whom everyone loves - but by the end everyone's trying to kill him. The American actor Will Ferrell is very interested in that.'