Like a lot of other people, we were pretty dern excited to hear the news last week that David Fincher was going to undertake a screen version of Torso, a graphic novel about Eliot Ness battling a killer in Cleveland. Though it's going to be a while before this one hits the screen, IESB sat down with producer Todd McFarlane and managed to get a few new details out of him.
  • Though Torso takes place after that whole capturing Capone thing, Ness is still in his mid-30s when he goes to Cleveland, so the ideal actor for the role is younger than we might expect. McFarlane says that a vague "they" are leaning towards Matt Damon for the role, and also mentions Leonardo DiCaprio as someone who "sort of fits [the] bill."
  • Fincher's original thought (before the release and success of Sin City) was that the film would be shot in black and white.
  • As far as a timeline goes, McFarlane hopes that the script will be done (meaning all the rewrites and drafts) by the time Fincher finished Zodiac. That way, if Benjamin Button (the director's next scheduled project) stalls in preproduction, Torso will be ready to go.
  • McFarlane hems and haws a lot about the film's fidelity to the graphic novel, but in the end it sounds possible that only the main points of the story will be the same. (No kidding. Seeing as how it's a true story, that's not much of a shock.)
  • Assuming a big star is landed to play Ness, the budget will be at least $65 million.
[via JoBlo]