When you're a director gathering the cast for your next movie, it helps if you know most of them, and in this case are married to one. Taylor Hackford has Morgan Freeman, Al Pacino, Helen Mirren and Danny DeVito all in the cast for his latest film, a new spin on the noir genre called Sniff.
Tom Grey wrote the script on spec and it found its way to Hackford. The story follows what happens when two residents die under suspicious circumstances in a high-end luxury retirement community. Retired detective Joe Mulwray (Freeman) is pulled back into the action by his former partner William Keys (DeVito), and they uncover a hidden underworld of sex, drugs and murder in the wealthy community controlled by kingpin Harvey Stride (Pacino), and his femme fatale enforcer, The Spider (Mirren).
In case you were wondering whether they'd misspelled "snuff", A) that has far bigger connotations for filmmaking and B) Sniff is an acronym for Senior Nursing Institute & Family Foundation.
"The whole concept of setting a film noir in an upscale retirement community…these are proliferating all over the United States as the baby boomer generation gets to retirement," Hackford tells Deadline. "There’s a lot of money and people want to live in a beautiful setting. Those are on the brochures, but what Tom Grey did was show what was lurking below the surface. I thought it was a brilliant idea and he understood the nature of good noir, the dark story, the incredibly twisted characters and I thought he had a great handle." For more from the director, hit up Deadline's site.
Sniff will be up for sale to distributors at the Toronto International Film Festival Market and Hackford is looking to start shooting early next year.