Aronofsky directing THE WRESTLER

By Matt Holmes / June 25, 2011

Variety. They say Nicolas Cage will stay in The Vanished, the first studio movie from Henry Abu-Assad, a Palestinian director who was Oscar nominated for his 2005 film Paradise Now in the Best Foreign Language category. The Focus Features thriller finds Cage in search of his college-aged American-born Muslim son, who's missing overseas and it will begin filming in April once Cage has complete The Wrestler. Now this is how the trade describe The Wrestler, and bare in mind we don't know who is directing it at this point, we only know that Aronofsky is producing...

Cage first plans to star for director Darren Aronofsky in indie drama "The Wrestler" in January.

So does that mean Darren Aronosfky is directing The Wrestler, or does it mean it's been produced by director (as that's what he is more known as) Darren Aronofsky. Like, if you were to say it was being produced by actor Robert De Niro, that doesn't mean he's acting in the film, it just means he's an actor by profession that's producing the film. If it does mean Aronofsky is directing, where does that put the Mark Wahlberg/Brad Pitt boxing drama The Fighter? We've previously heard that Wahlberg has been doing extremely extensive body work outs and training so he can actually look like he's in shape to be a boxer. Has The Fighter ran into trouble then or has Aronofsky ditched his plans to direct it and moved on to something else. The boxing drama was set to film in the New Year, there's an unavoidable clash here so it's one or the other, and surprisingly it could be the Nicolas Cage movie the director has gone for. Either way it's a straight narrative movie which Aronofsky so badly needs I believe, if his career is to go anywhere.