Are Jesuits Allowed to Kill People?: It’s looking like Martin Scorsese’s next film will be Silence, based on the Shusaku Endo novel. Daniel Day-Lewis, Benicio Del Toro, and Gael Garcia Bernal are all in talks to star (awesome). The story revolves around two Jesuit missionaries under heat in seventeenth-century Japan, and is reportedly nothing like this. [Variety]
Patel Airs It Out: Dev Patel is displaying some of the gutsiness of Jamal Malik, his Slumdog Millionaire character: The young actor has willingly joined the cast of M. Night Shyamalan’s first post-Happening project, The Last Airbender. But wait, it gets better! Dev’s role in the film — which revolves around the only living member of a race that can, yep, bend air (?) — was originally slotted for Jesse McCartney. Unfortunately, though, the internationally beloved musician had to drop out when his tour dates conflicted with Shyamalan’s standard pre-film boot camp, which this time will teach the actors martial arts. Um, wow. [Variety]
Cafeteria Table Drumming Alert: Pharrell Williams and McG are co-producing Limelight for ABC, a series loosely based on Williams’ experiences at his performing-arts high school. It’s unclear what exactly makes this different from a straight Fame remake other than the fact that, yes, of course, someone is already remaking Fame. [HR]
Schnabel Is On It: The Visitor’s Hiam Abbas will star in Miral, Julian Schnabel’s Israeli-Palestinian conflict movie. The film is an adaptation of Rula Jebreal’s book about Hind Husseini, who started an orphanage in Jerusalem after the 1948 war, and will cover events up to 1994. Schnabel, who says he’s “walking between the raindrops trying to get this film made,†wrote the screenplay and is scouting locations in Israel. And if you have to ask, the answer is yes, Julian Schnabel is going to solve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. [Variety]
Rourke Saddles Up: Big-time Indian director Vidhu Vinod Chopra is trying to land Mickey Rourke for the gangster film Broken Horses, his Hollywood debut. Chopra was motivated to cast Rourke, we can only assume, after catching Rourke’s heart-wrenching, tour-de-force performance as a broken-down-old shifty-eyed international terrorist in Dennis Rodman’s Double Team. [HR]
Wedding Bells: CBS has picked up reality TV show Arranged Marriage, in which four adults wed a spouse selected for them by their friends and family. The name of the show, from Top Chef producers Jane Lipsitz and Dan Cutforth, is only a working title, but is still far better than the previously considered America’s Top Arranged Marriages. [HR]