Keanu Reeves to Star in Film Version of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason

HOLLYWOOD, California – Avant-garde film director and screenwriter Charlie Kaufman announced today that he has signed Matrix trilogy star Keanu Reeves for the lead in his long awaited screen adaptation of Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. Bringing the philosophical classic to the big screen has been a dream of Kaufman’s for many years, but finding the right protagonist has been a major stumbling block, he told Hollywood reporters. “I’ve been fascinated with the relationship between the phenomenal and the noumenal ever since I first read Kant,” Kaufman explained. “Plus there’s that whole reconciliation of rationalism and empiricism to deal with and the problem of synthetic a priori knowledge. Exciting stuff. Well, to make a long story short, I knew I finally had the right approach when it came to me to rewrite it as an action / science fiction vehicle – the epic struggle between the merely phenomenal world of our experience and the ever lurking presence of pure noumena, hence my working title, Attack of the Things In Themselves.”

After his success with such offbeat films as Being John Malkovich, Adaptation and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Kaufman had little trouble getting Attack of the Things In Themselves (or TIT Attack, as Kaufman jokes) green-lighted. “All the major studios wanted to get on board. Money wasn’t the problem at all. But finding the right actor was almost a show stopper. I knew I needed someone who could convincingly project complete obliviousness to the rich tapestry of interlocking and underlying concepts of the movie as well as personify, physically as well as emotionally, the overwhelming blankness of pure noumena in the final reel. Amazingly enough, I’d forgotten all about the Matrix movies. Well, maybe not so amazing when you consider the last two of them. But then when I saw Keanau in The Lake House, suddenly everything clicked.”

Principle photography is scheduled to begin in late 2007. When recently asked how he could justify his current salary demand of "one gazillion dollars per movie," Reeves displayed his signature spasmodic head twitch and replied, “I know Kung Fu.”