Meanwhile, buzz on the project reached renowned filmmaker Robert Zemeckis (Forrest Gump, Cast Away), who signed on as executive producer, with his ImageMovers Productions partners Jack Rapke and Steve Starkey joining the producing team. All that remained was to find a director to do it justice.
Rapke, who launched his producing career with What Lies Beneath in 2000, following a successful 15-year run as a talent agent, couldn't have been more pleased when one of his former clients, three-time Oscar nominee Ridley Scott, expressed interest. "I was in the agency business for a long time because I love talent and I love to be working with talent and supporting their visions," Rapke says. "This a wonderful turn of events for me, having been Ridley's agent, to collaborate with him now in a whole different way in the production process."
Examining the director's scope, Rapke notes that "Ridley is known for some phenomenally big movies, epics like Gladiator and Black Hawk Down that use giant canvases. He's certainly one of the great visual directors. But at the same time, he's good at telling an intimate story with strong narrative, as he did in Thelma & Louise - something with a smaller production scale but still a big cinematic idea."
Starkey, who counts among his production credits Contact, Cast Away and Forrest Gump, underscores how Scott's deft touch suited the Matchstick scenario. "If you look at Ridley's body of work, you find character pieces in all of his films, even the ones that are better known for their scale and visual impact. At the core of those movies, it's really about the characters and that's what makes them work."
True to form, Scott cites the "unusually clever script" as piquing his interest in Matchstick. The legendary director, who was knighted this year in his native England for his contributions to the arts, has effectively interpreted a range of genres including science fiction (Blade Runner, Alien), historic drama (1492), action (Gladiator, Black Hawk Down), black comedy (Thelma & Louise), psychological/horror (Hannibal) and fantasy (Legend). While diverse, what they all have in common is Scott's initial, instinctive reaction to a story or idea.
"When I choose a project it's as though a bell goes off in my head, and I listen to that bell, which is my intuition," the director reveals. Once the process has begun, "all other aspects of a project start to come into focus."
Acknowledging that the story is essentially a comedy, "with humor all the way through," Scott notes that "it's also somewhat of a moral tale, which is all the more interesting because it's filled with characters practicing very bad behavior. For them, a good day is when they can take a few hundred dollars off a housewife in a Laundromat. They're not exactly what you'd call lowlifes, but they're pretty close. Their saving grace might be that their victims are people who are themselves seeking a fast buck or doing things they shouldn't be doing, so it's a case of them getting caught with their trousers down."
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