After delighting us with her surprisingly mature performance in the Coen bros’ True Grit in 2010, Hailee Steinfeld then went on to do a whole lot of nothing. Maybe the 15-year old Academy Award nominee took a couple gap years to Lohan it up on the sly, but she’s recently gone back in front of the camera for a number of projects that are currently in production.
Now she’s adding one more, and just like so many young girls before who were lured to Hollywood, she’s doing it for hallucinatory drugs and Kevin Costner.
The project is currently simply known as the Untitled Thriller and is a collaboration between Relativity Media and prolific French writer/director/producer Luc Besson’s EuropaCorp production house. Written by Besson (The 5th Element, The Professional, Taken) and Adi Hasak (From Paris With Love) and directed by McG (Charlie’s Angels, Terminator: Salvation, This Means War), the film will see Kevin Costner as “Secret Service Agent Ethan Runner who discovers he’s dying and decides to retire in order to reconnect with his estranged daughter. But when the Secret Service offers him access to an experimental drug that could save his life in exchange for one last assignment, he soon finds himself trying to juggle his family, his mission, and the drug’s hallucinatory side-effects.”
I’m sure it would be a fairly accurate guess that young Ms Steinfeld would be said estranged daughter, though judging by just how impressive she was in True Grit, I honestly would not have batted an eyelid if it was announced that she was actually the Secret Service agent, Ethan Runner.
At this point in time not much else is known about the movie, but it certainly has in intriguing premise. I know people that lost the ability to properly control their face with just a few puffs of the magic dragon, so pulling off top secret missions while you’re imagining pink elephants traipsing through fields of daffodils should make for some interesting cinema.