As he hits Toronto with his new film Trishna, Michael Winterbottom says he is waiting to hear if his next project to shoot will be one with Jack Black or one with Steve Coogan.

Depending on which finance comes together first, he will either be directing Jack Black in Bailout, which is based on Jess Walter’s book The Financial Lives of The Poets. The story is about a man struggling with financial meltdown. Prescience is putting together the finance, and its sister outfit Ealing Metro is handling sales.

Winterbottom is also lined up to direct a biopic of Soho porn baron Paul Raymond. “Matt Greenhalgh is writing the script with Film 4 financing,” he notes. Steve Coogan, who Winterbottom worked with on 24 Hour Party People and 2010 TIFF premiere The Trip, brought the project into Revolution Films. “It’s a really powerful story, and it’s also kind of funny. One of the challenges is to tell this story of 40 years in one film,” he says.

Of Coogan’s starring as Raymond, Winterbottom added: “It is absolutely perfect, it’s too perfect, it’s scary.”

Topics