Director Craig Gillespie (Lars and the Real Girl) is in negotiations to helm Million Dollar Arm, a sports drama for Disney that is based on real life events. Starring Jon Hamm (Mad Men) as sports agent J.B. Bernstein.  Million Dollar Arm tells the story of how two Indian cricket players, Dinesh Patel and Rinku Singh became finalists Bernstein’s titular reality show and landed Major League contracts.  Bernstein, burnt out from too many high-stress dealings with top-level talent, watched a cricket game on TV late one night and decided that the pitching motion was similar enough to baseball that there might just be a potential for some cross over.  Where could a stunt like this possibly work? Why, with the Pittsburgh Pirates, of course! Hit the jump for more.

Mad Men’s Jon Hamm is going from the board room to the baseball diamond in Disney’s Million Dollar Arm.  Hamm won’t be on the mound himself, but rather the man behind the talent, playing sports agent J.B. Bernstein.  Million Dollar Arm tells the story of how two Indian cricket players, Dinesh Patel and Rinku Singh became finalists Bernstein’s titular reality show and landed Major League contracts.  Bernstein, burnt out from too many high-stress dealings with top-level talent, watched a cricket game on TV late one night and decided that the pitching motion was similar enough to baseball that there might just be a potential for some cross over.  Where could a stunt like this possibly work? Why, with the Pittsburgh Pirates, of course!  Hit the jump for more on Million Dollar Arm, a dramatization of this unlikely, but true, story.

After three weeks of rave reviews in selected cities like New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Boston, Dallas and Phoenix, Win Win expanded to a host of new cities this weekend.  It paid off with $5,398 per theater, (in the top 5 averages over the past 3 days) and $1.22 million overall.  We’ve spread out our interviews with the film’s Oscar-nominated stars Paul Giamatti, Amy Ryan and newcomer Alex Shaffer through the platform release because highly praised independent films which actually exceed that hype are rare and deserve all the extended support that sites like the one you’re reading can provide.

That brings us to our fourth installment: an interview with the film’s Oscar-nominated filmmaker Tom McCarthy (The Station Agent, The Visitor and Up).  For a writer, director and actor who is so meticulous about his work on both sides of the camera, he was surprisingly open about his process in all three disciplines.  Hit the jump for the interview’s audio and transcript, including a look inside Pixar, the latest on The Million Dollar Arm, how Patricia Clarkson one-upped him on The Station Agent and his memories of an indie film trailblazer.  Continued after the jump.