Melissa McCarthy and Bill Murray may be making a movie together this summer. Deadline reports that McCarthy is about to be offered the female lead in St. Vincent De Van Nuys, a low-budget comedy-drama that Bill Murray signed onto last year. Deadline writes that “this is a role that all the top comic actresses chased†and that McCarthy auditioned and campaigned hard for the part. St. Vincent, from new writer/director Ted Melfi, follows a debaucherous misanthrope (Murray) who takes the 12-year-old son of his single mother neighbor (McCarthy, possibly) under his wing, but the kid only extracts the good from all of Murray’s character’s morally dubious life lessons. Tonally, the movie has been compared to As Good As It Gets and The Silver Linings Playbook. Filming is set to begin in July, and before then, McCarthy will star in and co-direct the comedy Tammy with her husband Ben Falcone, and Murray is busy filming roles in Wes Anderson’s The Grand Budapest Hotel and George Clooney’s The Monuments Men. It’s way too soon to say this, but this could be an awards contender come 2014.
Here’s writer/director Ted Melfi telling his Bill Murray story:
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.