Chris Pine and Noah Hawley head Nowhere Fast
Hawley's return to cinema is being billed as "a Texas crime thriller."
Noah Hawley is taking a detour from being one of television’s preeminent auteurs to return to the silver screen. He’s set to write and direct Nowhere Fast, “a Texas crime thriller following a small-town criminal who inadvertently kills the nephew of his boss,” per a press release. Chris Pine, coming off his own directorial debut Poolman, will star in the new film. Hawley’s own production company, 26 Keys Productions, will produce the movie, which is being co-financed by 30WEST.
Hawley hasn’t directed a feature since his 2019 debut Lucy In The Sky, the screenplay for which he co-wrote with Brian C. Brown and Elliott DiGuiseppi. The film was inspired by the true crime tale of Lisa Nowak, an astronaut arrested for attempted kidnapping in 2007. The film was a critical and commercial failure, earning just $326,000 on an estimated $21 million budget. “Movies ripped from the headlines often play fast and loose with the real-life events they’re reenacting,” A.A. Dowd wrote in his C review of the film for The A.V. Club, “But it’s rare to encounter one whose dramatic liberties actually result in a story less sensational, and less interesting, than the one presented by said headlines.”
Most PopularPine’s 2023 Poolman didn’t do so hot either; it was “a film that so deeply misunderstands what normal people like about the movies that it could have only come from someone who’s never done anything else,” as The A.V. Club‘s Emma Keates wrote in her D review. He’s been laying relatively low since (his most recent feature film credit is a voice acting role in Disney’s Wish), while Hawley returned back to television to do more Fargo and the upcoming Alien: Earth. But now they’re both getting back on the cinematically saddle, figuratively and perhaps literally if Nowhere Fast leans into the neo-Western aspect.
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