Merrick here...
At the world premiere of Verhoeven's STARSHIP TROOPERS, Harry and I met Jan De Bont.
At that point, De Bont was mulling a massive Science Fiction adventure called GALILEO'S WAKE. If memory serves, 'twas a space adventure about a frantic rescue mission to retrieve disaster survivors on a luxury space vessel of some sort. I'd always understood it to be something of a 'POSEIDON ADVENTURE in space,' but that's my own characterization and may not be 1,000 % accurate.
HARRY: I can't wait for your RV in space movie.
DE BONT: It's not an RV! It's more like a giant cruise liner. In space.
HARRY: Isn't that like an RV without wheels? In space?
That exchange is a close paraphrase, by the way, and has very little relevance to the story at hand now that I think about it - other than being anecdotal. De Bont never made that space movie (which DOES sound kinda cool) - but went on to direct THE HAUNTING and TOMB RAIDER: THE CRADLE OF LIFE before falling off the directorial grid when that was released in 2001.
But now he's back - which we've heard before, so we should take this with a grain of salt until it actually happens. According to THIS piece at Deadline, he'll helm FIVE MINUTES TO LIVE, described thusly by the site:
...the story follows two men as they execute a terrifying bank robbery. One guys holds the bank manager’s wife hostage and the other tells the manager she’ll be killed in five minutes unless he transfers money to an account of their choosing.
The original (1962) FIVE MINUTES TO LIVE, which starred Johnny Cash, can be found HERE. De Bont also directed the far-better-than-it-should've-been SPEED and the nowhere-near-as- good-as-it-should've-been Michael Chrichton adventure TWISTER, and served as the brilliant cinematographer on John McTiernan's DIE HARD and THE HUNT FOR RED OCTOBER, Ridley Scott's BLACK RAIN, and...well...Bill Cosby's infamous LEONARD PART 6. Which maybe wasn't so brilliant.
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