For years, actor/Coen Brothers regular John Turturro (Miller’s Crossing, Barton Fink, O Brother, Where Art Thou?) has been banging the drum for the return of his The Big Lebowski character Jesus Quintana. Now, according to Birth Movies Death, he may have gotten tired of waiting for the Coens and resurrected Jesus himself for his latest directorial effort Going Places, itself a remake of a 1974 French film starring Gerard Depardieu, Jeanne Moreau and Isabelle Huppert.
First announced by Showbiz 411 back in June, Going Places is produced by Robert Salerno (We Need to Talk About Kevin, A Single Man) and is set to star Turturro, Susan Sarandon, Bobby Cannavale, and Audrey Tautou. The plot revolves around a woman (Tautou) who joins up with a pair of criminal thugs (Turturro’s Jesus and Cannavale’s Petey) in the hopes of being able to achieve orgasm for the first time. Sarandon plays an ex-con fresh out of the joint.
“If I can get the permission I need, I’d like to return to that role,” said Turturro in 2014. “I have an idea, I want to do like a sequel where Jesus gets out of jail and drives a school bus. They like that idea! Because the guys that drive school buses, they never check them out. And you can just see the Jesus [grinning, bobbing his head] drivin’ the school bus… The only reason I wanted to make—well, not a sequel, but a spin-off or something. Joel and Ethan don’t really want to do it, but if I can get them to approve my outline, which I think they liked… Anyway, the only reason I wanted to do it was so that people will stop asking me questions about The Big Lebowski. So I could just get it out and do it and finish it. Because people are obsessed with the movie and obsessed with that guy.”
With Going Places currently filming in upstate New York (with no studio currently attached), it would seem that Turturro got the go-ahead he needed from Joel & Ethan Coen. Keep your eyes on ComingSoon.net for future updates and hopefully our first glimpse of The Jesus two decades later!
