Are we done yet? Nope. Two days after the last casting announcement, here's yet another. This time it's Clifton Collins Jr. who's had the call from Wally Pfister to join Transcendence, Pfister's directorial debut. His name gets added to a ridiculously starry roll-call that already includes Johnny Depp, Paul Bettany, Rebecca Hall, Kate Mara, Morgan Freeman and Cillian Murphy.
If you can't immediately place the name, the face at least will be familiar. Collins is the always-reliable character actor who's showed up in the dispararate likes of Scott Pilgrim, Star Trek, Sunshine Cleaning, Capote and Traffic. Most recently, he's been dwarfed by the giant mecha of Guillermo Del Toro's Pacific Rim.
Pfister, as we've said before, is taking a leaf out of his old employer Christopher Nolan's handbook, and revealing next to nothing about what **Transcendence **actually is. All the erstwhile Batman cinematographer has yet let slip is that the story in some way involves artificial intelligence. Nolan and Emma Thomas are exectuive producing.
"I’ve absolutely learned on the job working with Chris," Pfister told Empire last year, "even though I came in with a lot more experience than him. I had spent many years doing kind of straight-to-video crap movies, cranking out a movie in 18 days and keeping it rolling, so I was well versed in the mechanics. I was helping him learn about shooting action-style stuff and getting the right coverage and so on, but then Chris took that and applied it in his own way." And the moral of that story, kids, is that no experience is ever wasted.
Jack Paglen wrote the Transcendence screenplay, and the cameras are set to start turning over next month.