Benedict Cumberbatch to Star in ‘Blood Mountain’

Altitude to present project to buyers at European Film Market in Berlin

Benedict Cumberbatch has been attached to star in the thriller “Blood Mountain,” which Altitude Film Sales will be shopping to international buyers at the European Film Market in Berlin. UTA Independent Film Group is repping North American rights.

Julian Assange to Benedict Cumberbatch: 'You should reconsider your involvement in this enterprise'

Email reveals how the WikiLeaks founder attempted to derail the production of the 'The Fifth Estate' in which the actor starred

It was a performance that drew praise from the Prime Minister, who gushed over Benedict Cumberbatch’s “twitching” turn as Julian Assange.

But months before the release of a film charting the highs and lows of WikiLeaks there were mutinous rumblings from within the Ecuadorian Embassy, with the whistleblowing website founder fuming at his portrayal, it emerged.

The full text of an email from Assange to Cumberbatch, titled ominously “Message from Assange” and written in reply to Cumberbatch’s request for a meeting in January, was released and showed how Assange had attempted to derail the production of the The Fifth Estate. The Australian – who reportedly sleeps in a converted bathroom while attempting to avoid extradition to Sweden over sexual assault allegations – said he and actor would “forever be correlated in the public imagination”.

“But I must speak directly,” Assange went on. “I believe you are a good person, but I do not believe that this film is a good film.” He added: “I do not believe it is going to be positive for me or the people I care about. I believe that it is going to be overwhelmingly negative for me and the people I care about.” He said the film, which charts the rise of the website and its release of cables leaked by Chelsea Manning, was based on a “deceitful book by someone who has a vendetta against me and my organisation”. It charts the friendship and then rivalry of Assange and Daniel Domscheit-Berg, played by Daniel Bruhl. He warned Cumberbatch that he would be “used, as a hired gun, to assume the appearance of the truth in order to assassinate it”.

Cumberbatch’s performance has been among the few high points credited in a production widely panned by critics. The Independent’sKaleem Aftab described Cumberbatch’s performance as a “masterclass in mimicry” but said the film was let down “by some clumsy storytelling that trots out all the usual clichés and criticisms”. Assange said: “DreamWorks [the film’s producers] has based its entire production on the two most discredited books on the market. I know the film intends to depict me and my work in a negative light.”

He added: “I believe it will distort events and subtract from public understanding. It does not seek to simplify, clarify or distill the truth, but rather it seeks to bury it. It will resurrect and amplify defamatory stories which were long ago shown to be false.”

Extracts: Assange’s letter

“You will be used, as a hired gun, to assume the appearance of the truth in order to assassinate it. To present me as someone morally compromised and to place me in a falsified history. To create a work, not of fiction, but of debased truth. Not because you want to, of course you don’t, but because, in the end, you are a jobbing actor who gets paid to follow the script, no matter how debauched.

Your skills play into the hands of people who are out to remove me and WikiLeaks from the world. I believe you should reconsider your involvement in this enterprise. Consider the consequences of your cooperation with a project that… marginalises a living political refugee to the benefit of an entrenched, corrupt and dangerous state.”

Source: independent.co.uk

Benedict Cumberbatch rules Toronto fest

The international favorite has been busily promoting three movies.

TORONTO — It's unquestionable that Benedict Cumberbatch is the man of the moment at this film fest. Not that it doesn't come with a price.

"It's great. I wish I could enjoy the moment a bit more, (but) that's always the thing, isn't it?" says Cumberbatch, ensconced in a hotel room at the Ritz-Carlton. It's a gorgeous fall day outside, but with three prestigious movies to promote (Julian Assange biopic The Fifth Estate, the Steve McQueen-directed slavery film 12 Years a Slave and August: Osage County) the closest he's getting to the great outdoors is by squinting.

"I can see it through the crack in the door," says the star, who may tie Oprah for how many interviews a human is capable of participating in (on Saturday alone he topped out at 64).

Cumberbatch grins, shrugs. "High-class problems."

And no matter that his fans ("Cumberladies," as he politely rephrases the more crass term) are clamoring for him on the sidewalks. "I still get star-struck," he says. "Whether it's Sandra Bullock or Nicole Kidman. I met Brad (Pitt) backstage at 12 Years a Slave two nights ago. I really liked meeting him."

So far, Assange has yet to react to the finished Fifth Estate, which depicts his life and launch of WikiLeaks, although at one point he contacted Cumberbatch via e-mail "imploring me not to do the film," says the actor. Cumberbatch says he replied at length, assuring Assange he wasn't out to demonize him. The WikiLeaks founder thanked him, but the two never met. Now, as the film gears up for its Oct. 18 release date, "The criticism that hurts the most is that we are on one side or the other," Cumberbatch says.

Source: Usa Today

12 Years a Slave: Toronto film festival - first look review

Steve McQueen's much-hyped slavery drama is a brutal, excoriating and vital companion to Quentin Tarantino's Django Unchained

Chiwetel Ejiofor in 12 Years a Slave. Photograph: Allstar/NEW REGENCY PICTURES/Sportsphoto Ltd./Allstar

Stark, visceral and unrelenting, 12 Years a Slave is not just a great film but a necessary one. The phrase "long-awaited" has been much used to describe this third feature from British director Steve McQueen, which sees Chiwetel Ejiofor alongside Michael Fassbender in a star-studded cast. It's a common piece of cinematic hyperbole but it also describes the function this picture serves in confronting a practice that endured in the United States of America for nearly 250 years.

Based on a first-hand account, Ejiofor plays Solomon Northup, a violin player who lives a happy and relatively affluent life in Saratoga Springs, near New York City. It is 1841 and Northup is a free man apparently accepted as an equal by his white peers. When his wife takes a trip out of town, however, Northup is tempted into earning extra money by performing for a travelling circus. He heads to Washington with new companions only to be drugged, kidnapped and bound in chains just a stone's throw from the Capitol building.

From there Northup is severed completely from his old life. His name is changed to Platt and this urbane family man is told both to forget his identity and his skills. "Tell no one who you are and tell no one you can read or write," warns a fellow captive, "unless you want to be a dead nigger". He is shipped to Louisiana like so much chattel; one shot shows the tarpaulin pulled off a cart in which the slaves are carried like the lid being pulled from a sardine tin.

The rest of the film concerns itself with Platt's passage through the hands of several owners, each barbaric in their own way to someone they cannot stop to consider as being human. Paul Giamatti's trader Theophilus Freeman proves the strengths and reflexes of his slaves by jauntily beating them with cudgels. Benedict Cumberbatch's Master Ford considers himself a man of conscience but presides over plantation in which brutality reigns untrammeled.

Then, finally, there is Fassbender's Master Epps. He is renowned as a "nigger breaker", a sadist who keeps order through constant application of the lash. He wakes his slaves in the middle of the night and forces them to dance amid casual, liberal beatings. He is in constant fear of conspiracy and believes the ill will of his slaves to have caused God to curse his cotton crop. At the same time he has taken his most productive worker, Patsy (Lupita Nyong'o), to be a sex object.

Fassbender is brilliant in the part. Violence is always only a hair's breadth away, but his belief in his authority results in an eccentricity at times so delicate as to be even more terrifying than the temper. With his arm draped amicably over his shoulder he calmly threatens Platt with death. He goes straight from strangling a woman to softly cuddling terrified friend. Hand in hand with a child, he prances around in a smock.

Comparisons here can be made with another loquacious slaver, Leonardo Di Caprio's Calvin Candie from Django Unchained. Candie was a villain who conducted depraved acts without blinking. But, as with many of Tarantino's bad guys, he also had a rat-like cunning and a dry wit that lent him a kind of glamour. There is no such veneer on Fassbender's Master Epps however - and this is surely an important distinction.

As with the Tarantino movie there is frequent bloody violence and the word "nigger" is used as a matter of course. Not once does any of it provoke a thrill however. At first it provokes horror and disgust but ultimately there's an exasperation, a feeling that you cannot watch any more. Northup and his peers however have long since grown a callus where those sensitivities once lay. One of the most shocking things for the viewer might be how the slaves at various plantations carry calmly about their work as men and women are lynched and beaten around them.

12 Years a Slave is a scarifying, unblinking portrayal of life as it was for tens of thousands of people less than 200 years ago. It pulls no punches. But neither does it lecture. McQueen chooses to let all the actions and inactions convey their own message. As the film ends, there is no barnstorming speech, promise of change or bloody revenge fantasy, just a lingering shot of a man sobbing into the arms of his family.

Source: The Guardian