The last time he played a real person (in The Last King Of Scotland), Forest Whitaker walked away with a shiny Oscar. So you can understand the appeal of him starring as another actual man, albeit one on the side of good this time. He’s on board to play Archbishop Desmond Tutu in Roland Joffe’s The Archbishop And The Antichrist.
Joffe has adapted Michael Ashton’s play, which puts the very real Tutu in a fictional story about the Archbishop meeting a bigoted South African mass murderer called Piet Blomfeld who says he's seeking redemption. The plot is set during Tutu's work with the country’s Truth and Reconciliation hearings.
It sounds like the sort of film that the man who made The Mission and The Killing Fields could really do something with. But it’s not the only project he’s developing at the moment.
He’s also busy setting up In God We Trust, which he describes as “a thriller about stealing a country, manipulating money but also about the desire to kill your parents – sometimes those things go together.” Indeed…
But before he can get properly to work on either of the new films, there’s the small matter of the troubled Singularity to deal with. The time-spanning romantic drama, which features Josh Hartnett and Neve Campbell, has been stymied by financial issues and disputes between the producers and looked for a while as though it might never see the projector’s bulb. But it’s creeping closer to completion, and Joffe believes it could be ready by later in the year.