Director James McTeigue is currently casting up Message from the King

Last Updated on August 5, 2021

Originally announced way back in July of 2011, the next project from James McTeigue (V FOR VENDETTA) has taken its sweet time getting going. But McTeigue revealed in a recent interview that the casting process is currently underway for the thriller, and shared a few of his thoughts on what the movie is all about, why he’s making it, and how it matches up with DRIVE.

On the plot and the why the movie is worth making: Message from the King is about a mysterious outsider who comes into L.A. from South Africa looking for his sister who’s dropped off the radar. He ultimately finds out, in pretty short order, that his sister is dead; he finds her in the morgue with her eye poked out and her toe cut off. And it’s about him traversing L.A. and finding out what happened to her: why ultimately the city ate her alive, why the city killed her. She’s in touch with all of these disparate groups throughout the city, whether they’re Armenian gangsters or whether it’s a Hollywood producer or this strange kind of Beverly Hills dentist conduit that exists in this in-between world between all these disparate cultures. And he comes in and moves through the city in a very kind of vertical fashion. He doesn’t understand the politic of the city at all. So, I decided that I’d like to make that because it speaks about LA and I don’t think been there’s enough movies that are really about L.A. Michael Mann tries to do them, he’ll do it with Heat or Collateral, but I think this movie is really about L.A. and the people who make it, the people who fall through the cracks; it gives you a whole breadth of the city, which I really like.

On the rating: It’s an R-rated movie.

On the DRIVE connection: It’s not like Drive. Drive, to me, was a very European take on L.A. and if someone didn’t tell me that that movie was set in L.A., I really wouldn’t have known, you know? I think that this movie is much more about Hollywood itself and Beverly Hills and Bel Air and parts of the beach. Drive, to me, felt like it was very East L.A. or Valley driven. This is people’s classic perception of Los Angeles and it’s more about that and the twisting of that myth, I guess.

Technically the next project directed by James McTeigue is THE RAVEN starring John Cusack, and you can catch the serial-killer-thriller rather soon on April 27th. 

Or you can catch this very lovely view of Cusack’s co-star Alice Eve right now: