Creators of two great modern comedy series (The Office and Extras), Ricky Gervais and Steven Merchant have teamed together to make their first ever movie, Cemetery Junction. The plan is to adapt it into a TV series (think MASH) after the film. There’s no release date set for this film (IMDB claims April 2010 for the UK), and the teaser tells us next to nothing about the story, which follows three insurance salesmen in the 70’s. However, it displays that Gervais and Merchant still have their trademark humour, gently demeaning Ralph Fiennes.
The Invention of Lying is a farfetched idea that I can’t fathom as a funny movie although the movie includes Ricky Gervais, Rob Lowe, Tina Fey and Jennifer Garner.
The story is about a world where no one ever lies. Gervais plays a performer who tells the first lie and harnesses the power of lying for personal gain. The movie is co-directed and co-written by Ricky Gervais and first-timer filmmaker Matthew Robinson and opens September 25, 2009.
Ricky Gervais is the talent (well, half of) behind one of the most influential TV shows of the last decade, The Office. His follow-up, Extras, was less innovative and touching, but still excellent. So what is Gervais’s next project? This September will see the release of The Invention of Lying, a comedy about a world where no one ever lies, which Gervais’s co-directing and co-writing. But next year sees the release at his first attempt writing a feature film, Cemetery Junction. The plot follows three men working at an insurance company in 1970’s England. It stars Ralph Fiennes, Emily Watson, and Gervais himself. It’s also co-written by Stephen Merchant, the other half of the writing team behind The Office and Extras, so expect the comedy to be of top-class quality.
But that’s not the end of Cemetery Junction. Gervais also plans to adapt the premise into a TV series as well, as the idea was originally for television. Gervais said to Empire: “We thought that when you do a TV show and then do a film, generally it’s awful. One, it taints the film with a TV brush. It breaks its credibility a little bit. I don’t want to do a film that’s just an extended TV episode. So we want to give the film its best shot and treat it with the reverence a film deserves”. Sounds like a great idea.
Gervais is also working on a children’s animated film he created entitled Flanimals, due out in 2011.
“Flanimals” is coming to the big screen with the help of Universal-based Illumination Entertainment creating a 
3-D animated feature based on the children’s book series by Ricky Gervais.
Gervais will voice the lead character, and the script will be written by Matt Selman (The Simpsons).
The four-volume series of creatures so ugly and misshapen they are cute and endearing is illustrated by Rob Steen. The story encompasses a world inhabited by these 50 species of creatures. Gervais’ character, a pudgy, perspiring purple creature, goes on a mission to change the world.