Beaks is breathin' down your neck, sucka!

We've known for a while now that Roman Polanski's next film would be an adaptation of Robert Harris's sinister Prime Minister thriller, THE GHOST. Now, thanks to MTV Movies' Shawn Adler (and a minor assist from Variety), we know who's a-gonna star in it: Pierce Brosnan, Nicolas Cage and Tilda Swinton. These are very good actors.

Cage will star as a ghostwriter hired to complete the memoirs of a British ex-prime minister (Brosnan) when the first author unexpectedly dies. As Cage's character sifts through the politician's history, he begins to suspect that the last writer might've been murdered after turning up too much scandal, which raises the question: "Why does the prime minister insist on hiring such thorough writers when he could simply farm out his memoirs to a partisan hack?" Therein lies what I believe they call "the mystery".

Swinton will co-star as the ready-to-bolt wife of Brosnan who presumably wants it from Cage.

According to Adler, "Most of the story takes place in an oceanfront house in the middle of winter." Sounds like a quick shoot in the DEATH AND THE MAIDEN tradition. That's cool, I guess. I just hope Polanski gets a chance to return to POMPEII one of these days.