Righteous Kill to reunite Pacino and De Niro
Story by Jack Foley
AL PACINO and Robert De Niro are to reunite as New York police investigators hunting a serial killer in Jon Avnet’s $60 million thriller Righteous Kill, it has been confirmed.
The announcement, which is sure to delight film buffs around the globe, was made at the Cannes Film Festival by Avi Lerner, whose Millennium Films and Emmett/Furla Films will be handling the independently financed feature.
He told the assembled press: “You see those two icons onscreen together for virtually the whole film – something never seen before in the history of cinema. It’s one of the hardest deals we’ve ever done to put these two actors together.”
Pacino and De Niro have appeared in the same film on two previous occasions – but while both became instant classics, they seldom shared any screentime together.
In Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather Part II, for instance, they didn’t appear together at all, while in Michael Mann’s Heat they only united briefly for two short scenes.
Righteous Kill is being written by Russell Gewirtz, who past credits include Denzel Washington-Clive Owen thriller Inside Man (directed by Spike Lee) and the upcoming Labyrinth.
Randall Emmett, of Emmett/Furla Films, said both Pacino and De Niro had long been seeking to work together again and claimed he’d been happy to act as a catalyst to enable them to do so.
Shooting begins in August in Connecticut and New York and is expected to last for two months. The project is being independently financed although Lerner expects the film to be sold and distributed by a major studio before production begins.
Pacino previously worked with director Avnet on the upcoming thriller 88 Minutes and is currently due to appear in Ocean’s Thirteen alongside George Clooney, Matt Damon and Brad Pitt.
De Niro, meanwhile, is currently filming the Warner Bros comedy What Just Happened? having recently released his latest film as director, The Good Shepherd.
As yet, there is no release date Righteous Kill.
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