Variety reports that Clifton Collins Jr. has joined the cast of the upcoming thriller The Experiment, a group that already includes Adrien Brody, Forest Whitaker, Elijah Wood, and Twilight actor Cam Gigandet.
You may remember Collins as the elusive hitman in Steven Soderbergh's Traffic. In Capote, he played vicious killer Perry Smith, the subject of Truman Capote's In Cold Blood. Collins also appears in the upcoming Mike Judge movie Extract.
The Experiment, which begins shooting in Iowa next week, is based on the 2001 German thriller Das Experiment, directed by Oliver Hirschbiegel and starring Moritz Bleibtreu (Run Lola Run). Like the original, this remake will tell the story of a group of individuals selected to participate
in a psychological study. They are put into a mock prison in which half
of the participants are prisoners, the other half guards. As the
experiment progresses, the participants fall deeper into their roles,
resulting in abusive treatment.
Prison Break writer Paul Scheuring is directing the movie from his own script, which was based on the novel by Mario Giordano
(who also wrote the screenplay of the 2001 movie). Inferno
Entertainment and Magnet Media Group are financing the movie, which
does not yet have a specific release date.
The story idea is based in part on the
1971 Stanford Prison Project, which involved undergraduates at Stanford
participating in a similar study in the basement of the university's
psychology building. The study was planned for two weeks but had to be
abandoned after six days. You can read more about it on the study's official site.