Timothée Chalamet is eyeing a reunion with “A Complete Unknown” director James Mangold. The duo are set to reunite on another literary adaptation, this time in the fiction space with Jaime Oliveira’s “High Side.” Deadline first reported the project.
Chernin Entertainment is attached as the producer. Paramount won a highly competitive auction for the feature, as Variety reported.
Oliveira’s unpublished short story centers on a former MotoGP racer who enters into a life of crime. The synopsis reads: “Billy is a former MotoGP racer, haunted by a career-ending crash and a family legacy of abandonment, is drawn back into the world of high-speed risks and extreme danger. His estranged brother, already being pursued by the FBI, recruits him for a series of bank robberies on superbikes. A gifted motocross rider, Billy walked away from the sport after a devastating accident, and he has been making do caring for his addict father and the family garage. He’s blindsided when his estranged older brother Cole resurfaces—just after their father’s death—with a proposition: use Billy’s talents for something bigger. Robbing banks. Cole assembles a mismatched crew, including a woman who becomes Billy’s lover, and they begin knocking over small-town desert banks with speed and precision. But as the stakes rise, Lennox, an FBI agent with a complicated history with Cole, closes in as the crew preps its biggest score, a bank job timed with a big motorcycle parade.”
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“We’re thrilled to be in business with visionary artists like James and Timothée, and exceptional collaborators like Peter and David at Chernin. What Jaime has created reflects the kind of bold, original storytelling we’re committed to championing at Paramount – and we couldn’t be more excited to hit the ground running with ‘High Side,’” Dana Goldberg and Josh Greenstein, the new co-chairs of Paramount Pictures, said.
Mangold added that the Paramount executives have “a real commitment to original, story-driven filmmaking on the big screen and this passion made it easy for Timothée, Peter, and me to land on this project. Timothée is a trusted collaborator, a generational artist and a person I adore. I can’t wait to roll up my sleeves and work together again.”
Chalamet in the meantime is shooting the third “Dune” film and is leading Josh Safdie’s “Marty Supreme.”
Mangold’s “A Complete Unknown” received eight Oscar nominations. The filmmaker has previously helmed action sequences in “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny,” “Copland,” and “Girl Interrupted,” among others, prior to possibly directing “High Side.”
Mangold told IndieWire that working in an array of genres has led him to ask for advice from a slew of different fellow directors. “At this point I’ve known and befriended a lot of great directors, from Milos Forman to Alexander Mackendrick to Steven Spielberg,” Mangold said. “The one thing I can say consistently is that they may have a plan, but what we all do is if something better comes up, we jump on it and make it look like we thought of it. We don’t just shoot it, we own it, frame it in a way that looks like we planned it.”
He added of how he directs, “I don’t hide whatever bullshit I might be dealing with from the studio or anything like that from the cast, and I don’t want them to hide anything from me. I’m also unafraid to act silly or act out the scene. And because I’m a writer on the movie, I think it helps the actors feel like they can challenge the words and not worry about it, because if it’s better I’ll change it in a heartbeat.”
