Movies
It’s Okay That Kristen Stewart Was Offered ‘Akira’ Lead…
It’s hard to get the stank taste of Twilight out of my mouth when speaking of Kristen Stewart, but it’s even more difficult to argue that she isn’t quite the little actress. I was charmed by her in Adventureland, she rocked as Joan Jett in the indie The Runaways, and hit the road in Sean Penn’s widely successful Into the Wild. Of the Twilight acting trio, she’s the only one I take seriously.
With that said, I welcome Stewart as a potential candidate for Warner Bros. Pictures’ Akira, which is finally to be directed by House of Wax and Orphan‘s Jaume Collet-Sera.
Twitch reports that Stewart has been offered the part of Kei, a young medium who becomes the love interest for Kaneda – the role already publicly offered to Garrett Hedlund (Tron: Legacy).
Originally planned as a trilogy (and since abandoned), “Akira” originated in 1988 as a manga and then as an animated film co-written and directed by Katsuhiro Otomo. Set in New Manhattan, the cyberpunk sci-fi epic follows the leader of a biker gang who must save his friend, discovered with potentially destructive psychokinetic abilities, from government medical experiments. 
Two things that have proven to be pretty dependable at the box office in recent years are horror movies and Christopher Nolan movies. With Nolan’s The Odyssey absolutely dominating the box office this past weekend, many fans of Nolan’s work have been left hungry for a Nolan-directed horror movie. After all, The Odyssey does whet the appetite for Nolan nightmare fuel.
Christopher Nolan has brushed up against the horror genre in the past with 2002 thriller Insomnia, but does he have any interest in someday making a full-on horror movie?
Nolan tells the Empire Podcast in a new chat, “I’ve always been interested in doing a horror film.”
“But horror is most successful when the conceptual framework of whatever the story is is just so undeniable. I think there are very few really great horror movies,” Nolan continues.
So why hasn’t Christopher Nolan directed a horror movie yet?
He explains to Empire, “I’ve never clicked with a particular idea or concept that worked for me. I love the genre. Of all genres, it’s the most visceral. Where the direct response to the audience is the most important. That is to say, you’re trying to make people literally feel something in their bones about what’s going on on-screen.”
Nolan calls horror “a genre in which experimentation is demanded.” He explains, “I go to see a lot of horror films with my kids these days, and you’ll see things in the first half an hour, 45 minutes of any horror film that you’d never see in another genre. Risks that are taken. Dangerous approaches to things. Admittedly, a lot of movies can’t sustain that to the end. But in the horror genre, that kind of innovation is not just respected – it’s really demanded.”
Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey is now playing in theaters.
Cillian Murphy as Scarecrow in Christopher Nolan’s ‘The Dark Knight’ (2008)
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