Al Pacino eyes starring role in Blink Reuters
Posted online: May 22, 2009 at 1743 hrs

: The mystery of how Malcolm Gladwell’s nonfiction bestseller Blink will be turned into a movie is starting to give way to answers.
Al Pacino is in talks for one of the lead roles, with a number of younger actors, some with tween appeal, circling the other lead part in the film.
The script by Stephen Gaghan (Traffic, Syriana), who is also directing, will centre on an older man and the twenty-something son he was never close to. After the two reconnect, the boy, an idealistic drifter who’s teaching in a downtown New York school and the father, a finance type living in Connecticut, must navigate their new relationship.
The connection to the book is that the son has the Blink qualities that Gladwell discusses: He can size up people and situations on a dime. Recognising this ability, his father wants to help the boy find himself while at the same time using him to make some dough on Wall Street.
The project initially had been set up at Universal but has been reincarnated as an independent film, with William Morris Independent’s Incentive film fund coming up with the financing and shopping the package to US distributors here in Cannes.

Simon ‘Mentalist’ Baker nabs Killer role
Simon Baker, star of the hit series The Mentalist, is playing an attorney on the trail of a murderer in The Killer Inside Me, Michael Winterbottom’s adaptation of the Jim Thompson noir classic that stars Casey Affleck.
The story centres on a West Texas sheriff (Affleck) and his downward spiral from bored small-town cop to ruthless, socio-pathic murderer. The cast includes Jessica Alba as a prostitute and Kate Hudson as the sheriff’s schoolteacher girlfriend. Baker plays a county attorney trying to expose the sheriff as the killer.
The adaptation was written by Robert Weinbach and John Curran, director of We Don’t Live Here Anymore and The Painted Veil.
Baker, a native of Australia, plays a private investigator with psychic abilities on CBS’ Mentalist, a breakout hit of the 2008-09 television season.