James Cameron's forever-developing manga adaptation Alita: Battle Angel has now added Watchmen's Jackie Earle Haley to the cast. Rosa Salazar plays the titular female cyborg warrior with Christoph Waltz as her mentor Doctor Dyson Ido, a cyber-scientist who discovers the amnesiac robot in a trash heap and rebuilds her into a killing machine. Haley will be doing what he does best which is playing the villain, a monstrous foe that will require a lot of CG and green screen. Robert Rodriguez is directing for a hopeful July 2018 release. Haley will be seen next, again as a bad guy, in Nate Parker's The Birth of a Nation. [THR]
Paul Schrader (The Canyons) has cast Ethan Hawke and Amanda Seyfried in his next film, First Reformed, which probably nobody will see and most people will hate. Hey, he's making movies for himself now clearly. Anyway, Hawke plays a former military chaplain devastated with grief over the loss of his son. Seyfried is a parishioner whose radical environmentalist husband commits suicide, setting the chaplain on a perilous journey. Schrader, who wrote the amazing Taxi Driver screenplay years ago, wrote this script as well. His most recent movie, Dog Eat Dog, is now playing at TIFF.
