“Bye movie!”

Hey, remember earlier today when Vince was all, “Gavin O’Connor is replacing Lynne Ramsay as director on Jane Got a Gun because she completely no-showed on the first day of filming and everyone was like, WTF lady”? But then the movie people were like, “Chill out everyone, we’re going to be fine because we already lost Michael Fassbender before and we replaced him with Joel Edgerton, but we still have Jude Law and Natalie Portman, so this movie is going to be just fine”.

Well… about that.

While the troubled independent feature Jane Got A Gun got a new director this morning in Gavin O’Connor, fallout continues from Monday’s abrupt exit of helmer Lynne Ramsay. I’m told that Jude Law has formally withdrawn from the film. It is because he signed on to work with Ramsay, best known for the edgy drama We Need To Talk About Kevin. The producers of Jane Got A Gun have tried to hold its cast together when Ramsay stepped out, and this is the second significant star to drop out in the past few weeks. (Via Deadline)

What is still the strangest thing about this maligned film production is that Ramsay hasn’t broken her silence about why she just said, “F*ck it” and decided to bail. Fassbender’s excuse was that the production interferes with X-Men: Days of Future Past, which is clearly more important (even though they’ve cast Booboo Stewart, which is just bullsh*t). And Law’s excuse is that he thought he’d be working with another director, which is kind of a cheap shot at O’Connor, but a guy should be able to choose his boss, right?

So what’s Ramsay’s excuse? There are whispers that maybe she was forced out by the producers, but who knows? Well, I don’t have word from the disappearing director herself, but I do, in a super FilmDrunk exclusive, have the next best thing…

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"What, pussy? How do YOU hotbox?"

FilmDrunk alter-ego Nick Nolte recently sat down for an interview with Movieline, and to my delight, it was awesomely Nick Nolte-ish.Whether it’s narrowly escaping a house fire, rummaging through trash cans looking for his satchel filled with beer and Xanex, or using “read a line” as a euphemism for snorting coke off his scripts, at 70 years old, Nick Nolte is still an unkillable machine of pure mischief, a human one-eared raccoon. He stars in this weekend’s Warrior, and from the sound of it, he spent the whole shoot raisin’ hell and not givin’ a f*ck like it was his job, because it basically is.

ML: Did you have a local bar where you did your drinking?
NOLTE: No, I had this assistant and she had a boyfriend who was a little… [Pauses] Mixed-up. The assistant was a little mixed-up too. We had been rehearsing a week and I said to her, “Should we do the right thing and go home? Or do we do the wrong thing and go to a club and meet up with your boyfriend? I’ll leave it up to you.”ML: Oh no!

NOLTE: That was a terrible thing to do. Of course she said, “Let’s meet with Bobby.” We meet with Bobby even though I have to rehearse in the morning at 10 o’clock. Come 5 o’clock, we’re still at this apartment. There was booze and you know, other stuff. We rolled into rehearsal the next morning and I went straight to Gavin’s [O'Connor, the director] assistant and said, “Man, you wouldn’t believe the night I had. There was more cocaine there, more alcohol, this guy with tattoos all over him and rings, this girl who wanted to leave with me but she had been with him for 10 years and he was threatening to kill me. We barely got out of there alive.”

By “we” barely got out of there alive, I think he means everyone else, because everyone knows Nick Nolte cannot be killed by traditional methods. Nick Nolte stared death square in the face and spit tobacco juice on his robe.

In any case, I think “Booze and Other Stuff” would be a great title for Nick Nolte’s autobiography.

"Aw, hell."

Hollywood makes three MMA movies a month now, and it’s fair to assume that all of them will suck.  But Warrior stars Tom Hardy from Bronson, Nick Nolte from dumpster diving, and some guy who looks like Chael Sonnen, which is more than enough to put it ahead of that one with C-Tates, that other one with Cam Gigandet, and that one where Kevin James saves the rec center.  Which of course isn’t saying much.  Warrior comes from director Gavin O’Connor — who financed the MMA doc The Smashing Machine, so you know he knows the material — and previously directed Miracle, so you know he’s kind of a cheeseball.

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Nick Nolte has joined the cast of Warrior, Gavin O’Connor’s MMA movie.  Nolte will play the ex-boxer, recovering alcoholic father of MMA fighters Tom Hardy (Bronson) and Joel Edgerton, who are destined to meet in the ring.  Here is O’Connor’s insanely thorough synopsis (feel free to skip it, I’ve already told you all you really need to know):

“The movie is about two estranged brothers that haven’t seen each other in 14 years, and they come back together and they are both mixed martial arts fighters. One of them, when we meet him, is a schoolteacher who is married. He has three little girls. His wife had a heart transplant so he is massively in debt. He starts fighting in what is called “Smokers.” They [happen] all over the country. There are guys [fighting] in parking lots in cages, and you can walk away with a couple of thousand dollars. The other brother we discover is AWOL from the Marines, and he has been arrested in Mexico and thrown in prison. Being a gringo in a Mexican prison wasn’t very easy, so he had to defend himself. The guy is an animal and was kicking everyone’s ass, and he became known as the king of this prison. Some guy got him out, and he traveled all around Mexico fighting these underground fights. And he ends up leaving there and going to see his father. Fourteen years before, he and his mother had left while the other brother and the father stayed. The father was an alcoholic and an emotionally abusive man, a Vietnam vet, ex-Golden Gloves fighter who taught his kids how to fight at a very young age. And the kid, Tommy, goes back to see his dad. Tommy is drinking now and [is a] pill popper. He comes home, and his father is a thousand days sober and is living a very different life. The story is about healing and forgiveness [and f-cking people up in the ring! -Ed.]. There is a tournament called “Sparta” for the heavy weight championship of the world of mixed martial arts. It is a $5 million purse, and it is a 16-man grand prix tournament. And these two brothers are on a collision course to fight each other for the heavy weight championship of the world. And everything about their relationship, their past and their future is dealt with by communicating through violence.” [Premiere Magazine via CagePotato]

According to my exclusive sources, Nolte recently watched his first MMA fight in order to prepare for the role. “Wait, ya mean they can’t use tire irons?” he reportedly asked friends.  “That’s how my sister fights.”