David O Russell may be directing the Black List script American Bullshit, but no one is quite sure. Including Russell himself.
Reports came late yesterday that the I Heart Huckabees and The Fighter director was attached to direct the script that charts the tale of the 1980s Abscam political scandal for Sony. Russell denied those reports later in the evening in an email to Deadline stating that the project was only just one of many he was considering –
Reports that I am attached to American Bullshit are premature. It is something I am in early discussions on and I have great respect for Chuck Roven and Christian Bale. I am also developing other projects and have not chosen my next film.
Russell has had a lot of offers since the critical acclaim of The Fighter and I can understand him taking his time to choose his follow up project. We may well see American Bullshit on Russell’s roster at some point, though I would imagine that he would want to line up a couple of projects before making announcements on any of them.
I would suspect, though, if Ben Affleck’s Argo, about a mission to extract civilians from Tehran during the uprising of the late 1970s, is a hit this fall then Sony may push hard to get American Bullshit going with or without Russell. Both stories are political thrillers set around the same time period, although American Bullshit has a more darkly humorous bent to it.
