During an interview last month with MTV News to promote his new film The Private Lives of Pippa Lee, Keanu Reeves dropped an update on his next anime-based live-action movie Cowboy Bebop.
Early this year, the pre-production ran into some trouble mainly with the budget, which Reeves sarcastically described as "half a billion dollars," projected to make the movie based on the first draft submitted by writer Peter Craig. So, 20th Century Fox requested Craig to rewrite it to lower the price tag.
Craig is a novelist specializing in protoganists that have real-world personal issues. Producer Erwin Stoff and Sunrise, Inc. (the Japanese production company that created the anime TV series) producer Kenji Uchida and director Shinichiro Watanabe feel good about having Craig write the screenplay because of what he's proven he can do with character-driven stories.
Cowboy Bebop is a half-hour Japanese anime series in 1998 that follows the adventures of three bounty hunters (Spike Spiegel, Jet Black, and Faye Valentine) who roam space in their ship called, the Bebop, in 2071 catching criminals because the regular police just doesn't have enough manpower to do so.
What makes Cowboy Bebop an instant cult classic and refreshingly different from a sea of anime movies is its combination of action, adventure, comedy, western, low-tech sci-fi, Hong Kong gangster movies, and noir.
Reeves is attached to play the role of Spike, who is a former member of a mob called, the Red Dragon Crime Syndicate. No actors have been announced yet to play Jet and Faye.
Many fans of the anime series are furious about the casting of Reeves believing that the actor just doesn't have what it takes to play the cool yet haunted hero who also happens to be a master of Bruce Lee's martial arts technique, the Jeet Kune Do.
Not only that, Craig has some big shoes to fill in making his adaptation. Anime-series writer Keiko Nobumoto consistently creates great plots and sub-plots for each episode while staying true to the tone of each characters and style of the series, which makes the involvement of Uchida and Watanabe so vital to the movie's success in reproducing the anime's mystique.
As of now, it's too early to tell if this venture will fly or crash. Yet, the thought of having a live-action version of one of my favorite anime ever is quite exciting!
Obviously, there's still no date yet on when production will begin. So stay tuned!
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