Bill Murray’s next movie St. Vincent De Van Nuys, just found a new home at The Weinstein Company. According to Deadline, the studio will be financing and distributing the film, which is the feature directorial debut of the movie’s writer Ted Melfi. Murray signed on to the project this summer, which he’ll star in as a debaucherous older guy who starts looking after the 12-year-old son of a single mother, his neighbor. The man teaches the kid all about gambling, fighting, stealing, and other dirtbag stuff, but the boy only takes away the good from all this. Here’s writer/director Ted Melfi describing meeting Bill Murray, who’s always the subject of unusual and whimsical tales:
“I’m driving one day, the phone rings and it’s Bill Murray, and he says, ‘Ted Melfi, I don’t know who you are, but I love your script.’ He asked me to meet him at LAX and go for a ride as he returned home from a golf tournament. I met him in baggage, we got in a town car. He pulls the script out of an attache case. It’s dog-eared and there are notes all over it. We stop at an In-N-Out Burger, and spent a three hour drive to I don’t know where discussing the script. He understood everything about the character, and his notes were simple, direct and to the point. He said, this character is who I am at times, and this is how I talk, at times. It was one of those days where you think, if I died tomorrow, it would be okay.â€
Production on St. Vincent De Van Nuys is expected to begin in June 2013. Bill Murray is currently preparing to film Wes Anderson’s The Grand Budapest Hotel and George Clooney’s WWII picture The Monuments Men, about a team of art curators rescuing classic paintings from the Nazis. Plus, he’s playing FDR in Hyde Park on Hudson, which drops next month, and also has director Roman Coppola’s Charlie Sheen movie A Glimpse Inside the Mind of Charles Swan III in the can. A lot to look forward to these next couple years, Murray fans!