Seems like the inter­net is once again up to mis­chief, this time it revolves around “There will be blood” direc­tor, Paul Thomas Anderson.

Kotaku recently spoke with Aki Saito — the fel­low han­dling movie nego­ti­a­tions. When quizzed about Kojima’s involve­ment with the movie, he responded:

Hol­ly­wood has great respect for Mr. Kojima. They want to meet with him. Kojima will be act­ing as a pro­ducer, but we don’t know how involved he’ll be as a pro­ducer. Often Hol­ly­wood adap­ta­tions have the orig­i­nal game cre­ator involved at the begin­ning, but some­where along the line they fall out of view. This is why it’s very impor­tant for us to care­fully pick the stu­dio for this project.

Before adding that Paul Thomas Ander­son was an inter­ested direc­tor. This cir­cu­lated the world wide web like some elec­tron­i­cally fuelled wild­fire. There was some spec­u­la­tion that the much less aus­pi­cious Paul W.S. Ander­son (Alien Vs. Preda­tor) had been mis­taken for some­one with tal­ent. Luck­ily Col­lider stepped in to clarify:

I’ve emailed [movie] pro­ducer Mike De Luca and he said the rumor about Paul Thomas Ander­son is “com­pletely false and ridiculous.”

So that’s that.

The Morn­ing Call have revealed that Bethlehem’s film­ing shall be at a steel works, a highly mech­a­nized and per­fectly suited backdrop:

Try to imag­ine giant, extrater­res­trial robots dis­guised as tractor-trailers on Route 22 or cam­ou­flaged among the tow­er­ing Beth­le­hem Steel blast furnaces.

A film crew from ”Trans­form­ers 2″ will bring those shape-shifting robots to life in south Beth­le­hem next month for a movie scene in front of the iconic furnaces.

Of course, no one will see the robots because they’re computer-generated. But any­one will be able to see the action at the old Steel site as the film­mak­ers trans­form it into a fic­tional Chi­nese city pop­u­lated by peo­ple from the Lehigh Val­ley.

[…]

The movie crew will film in Beth­le­hem dur­ing the first week of June and will use the blast fur­naces as the scene’s back­drop, Calla­han said.

[…]

Accord­ing to an announce­ment from Heery Cast­ing of Philadel­phia, the film­mak­ers hope to cast local ”Asian men and women, boys and girls, ages 7 [to] 65″ as paid extras in the movie. In par­tic­u­lar, the crew hopes to recruit extras of Asian descent who have mil­i­tary backgrounds.

Thanks locoexw!

In an inter­view with IGN, writer Roberto Orci con­firmed that fan favourite Sound­wave would be mak­ing an appear­ance in the sequel:

Q: What’s the sta­tus of Trans­form­ers 2?

ORCI: That starts shoot­ing in three weeks.

Q: What do you want to do that builds from the first one?

ORCI: We want to fol­low some of our lead char­ac­ters which we thought were so suc­cess­ful. Shia’s char­ac­ter; where is he two years later? His girl­friend, where is she two years later? But for fans, I guess I’ll address this more for the fans, because I think if you didn’t know Trans­form­ers at all and you came in and you liked the first movie, you’ll like the sec­ond one. How­ever, some of the die hard fans, which we were a mem­ber of that group, felt, well, maybe it’s a lit­tle light. Maybe it wasn’t sci­ence fic­tiony enough. And I think the sec­ond one will deliver on a true Trans­form­ers story. You know, the first one, we had a lim­ited bud­get for what it was. Every sec­ond of Trans­former time is a mil­lion dol­lars or what­ever the heck it is, so this time, because we were able to prove through the whole thing that it’s a viable live-action movie, we have a lit­tle more free­dom this time to actu­ally learn about the Trans­form­ers, see them, hear them. It’s a bet­ter bal­ance between the humans and the Transformers.

Q: Is there one par­tic­u­lar Trans­former, good or bad, that you absolutely had to get into the sequel?

ORCI: Yes.

Q: You’re not gonna tell us.

ORCI: I’ll tell you. We had to get Sound­wave in there.

Q: Nice. Where Sound­wave goes, will Rav­age follow?

ORCI: Per­haps! Who’s Rav­age? … I’m kid­ding! You know, we had Rav­age in an early draft of the first movie and Sound­wave, and we couldn’t do it right and I think this time hope­fully we’ll have the abil­ity to do it.

Chud have con­firmed that John Voight (Defense Sec­re­tary John Keller) and Tyrese Gib­son will be repris­ing their roles in the movie sequel:

‘I just talked to Shia a sec­ond ago, and left John Voight a mes­sage 15 min­utes ago,’ he said, inad­ver­tently let­ting slip that Voight’s Sec­re­tary of Defense char­ac­ter returns for the sequel.

‘Michael Bay is going to up the ante on round two and raise the level. I can’t go into any details , but it’s going to be some real one of a kind things in this movie that no one has seen visu­ally in their life. Michael Bay is really fired up to try and outdo what he did on the first round.’

Via Vari­ety and Jordan’s first pavil­lion at the Cannes film fes­ti­val, we have found out that Michael Bay plans to take TF2 to Jordan:

Jor­dan […] is join­ing the Mideast film gold rush with a num­ber of projects and ini­tia­tives designed to bol­ster the country’s film biz.

Paramount-DreamWorks has inked with the Jor­dan­ian Royal Film Com­mis­sion to film “Trans­form­ers 2” in the coun­try and Fox has scouted loca­tions in the coun­try for its bigscreen “The A-Team.” It is believed to be in dis­cus­sions for the action pic to lense there.

Batman-On-Film have posted an exclu­sive new one sheet poster in the style of the two lat­est posters, though this time show­ing off the Joker. Judg­ing by the URL at the bot­tom of it, seems to have come from a source in the UK.

Com­ing via Chicago Film Fes­ti­val:

THE DARK KNIGHT GALA
A NIGHT HONORING FILMMAKER CHRISTOPHER NOLAN

Wednes­day, July 16, 2008
IMAX The­atre | 600 E. Grand Avenue

You are cor­dially invited to a once-in-a-lifetime Gala evening hon­or­ing film­maker Christo­pher Nolan!

Cinema/Chicago, the 44th Chicago Inter­na­tional Film Fes­ti­val and Warner Bros. Pic­tures proudly present the first Chicago show­ing of THE DARK KNIGHT, the follow-up to the action hit Bat­man Begins. THE DARK KNIGHT reunites film­maker Christo­pher Nolan and star Chris­t­ian Bale, who reprises the role of Batman/Bruce Wayne in his con­tin­u­ing war on crime. The City of Chicago is promi­nently show­cased in the film, with shots of the old Chicago Post Office, the State of Illi­nois Cen­ter, the IBM Build­ing, Upper and Lower Wacker Drive, and LaSalle Street, among other locations.

The evening will include a trib­ute to film­maker Christo­pher Nolan fol­lowed by a screen­ing of THE DARK KNIGHT in IMAX®, which fea­tures six sequences shot with IMAX® cam­eras. “Nolan’s work has cap­ti­vated both crit­ics and audi­ences alike. Memento remains one of the great direc­to­r­ial and writ­ing achieve­ments in cin­ema. He is a mod­ern writer/director who approaches all aspects of his work with a style and sophis­ti­ca­tion seen only amongst the most élite tier of film­mak­ers,” remarks Fes­ti­val Founder and Artis­tic Direc­tor Michael Kutza.

A din­ner recep­tion will fol­low the trib­ute and screen­ing in the stun­ning Crys­tal Gar­dens at Navy Pier, lit up by a spec­tac­u­lar fire­works dis­play. The Gala will ben­e­fit Cinema/Chicago, its year-round edu­ca­tional pro­grams, and the 44th Chicago Inter­na­tional Film Festival.

Warner Bros. Pic­tures presents, in asso­ci­a­tion with Leg­endary Pic­tures, a Syn­copy Pro­duc­tion, a Christo­pher Nolan film, THE DARK KNIGHT. Nolan directed the film from a screen­play writ­ten by Jonathan Nolan and Christo­pher Nolan, story by Christo­pher Nolan and David S. Goyer. Charles Roven, Emma Thomas and Christo­pher Nolan are the pro­duc­ers, with Ben­jamin Mel­niker, Michael E.Uslan, Kevin De La Noy and Thomas Tull serv­ing as exec­u­tive pro­duc­ers. THE DARK KNIGHT is based upon char­ac­ters appear­ing in comic books pub­lished by DC Comics. Bat­man was cre­ated by Bob Kane.

Evening Pro­gram:

5:30PM Red Car­pet Arrivals
6:30PM Trib­ute and Award Pre­sen­ta­tion to film­maker Christo­pher Nolan
7:00PM Gala screen­ing of The Dark Knight
9:30PM — 11:30PM Din­ner Recep­tion at The Crys­tal Gardens

TICKET PRICE:

Advance ticket price: $150/ticket if pur­chased by June 1
After June 1: $175/ticket

TICKETS ON SALE AT 9:00AM ON FRIDAY, MAY 16! LIMIT 4 PER PERSON.

PRESALE tick­ets avail­able to Cinema/Chicago mem­bers May 12–15.

To pur­chase tick­ets, please call 312–683-0121 x154, or click here.

The third Dark Knight tele­vi­sion spot is now air­ing, here is the online ver­sion for you: