In the action drama Drive, actress Carey Mulligan plays Irene, the mother of a young son whose father (Oscar Isaacs) is in prison. One day, Driver (Ryan Gosling) meets Irene in an elevator ride at his apartment and he becomes transfixed. When trouble starts, Driver finds himself embroiled even further in Irene’s life.

Following the FilmDistrict Studio panel in Hall H at Comic-Con, Carey Mulligan sat down for a roundtable and talked about how Nicolas Refn was on her fantasy wish list of directors that she wanted to work with, the challenge of making a film where the dialogue has been stripped away, how she wishes she had more stunt work to do, and that she would love to play a butt-kicking heroine in an action movie, but preferably without a spandex costume.

Click here for the audio. You can also click here for all our Drive coverage from Comic-Con, which includes more interviews and our recap of the footage/panels.

Question: It seems like you’ve been working a lot lately.

CAREY MULLIGAN: Does it? That’s awful.

Is it true that you hadn’t worked in awhile before you made Drive?

MULLIGAN: I didn’t work for a year after Wall Street. I finished that in November, and then it was the following October that I did Drive, so I took a year off. I didn’t do anything at all, really. I just hung around.

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Hopefully by now Nicholas Winding Refn’s Drive is on your radar. If it’s not, it damn well should be. Refn’s minimalist, 70′s inspired thriller has picked up some considerable momentum since winning the best director award at Cannes.

“Filmed in and around Los Angeles, the crime drama stars Academy Award® Nominees Ryan Gosling (Blue Valentine, The Notebook) and Carey Mulligan (An Education, Wall Street 2: Money Never Sleeps) alongside Golden Globe® Winner Ron Perlman (Sons of Anarchy), Emmy® Nominee Christina Hendricks (Mad Men), Oscar Isaac (Body of Lies, Robin Hood) and Academy Award® Nominee Albert Brooks (Taxi Driver, Broadcast News).

DRIVE is the story of a Hollywood stunt driver by day (Ryan Gosling), a loner by nature, who moonlights as a top-notch getaway driver-for-hire in the criminal underworld. He finds himself a target for some of LA’s most dangerous men after agreeing to aid the husband of his beautiful neighbor, Irene (Carey Mulligan). When the job goes dangerously awry, the only way he can keep Irene and her son alive is to do what he does best – Drive! ”

Soon UK folks will be able to see what all the fuss is about, as Icon Film Distibution have picked up Drive for a UK theatrical release on 23rd September 2011.

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We have found our Tom Buchanan! EW.com reports that Joel Edgerton has been cast in The Great Gatsby as Daisy’s husband, Tom Buchanan.

Baz Luhrmann told Deadline that Edgerton “could credibly be (as F. Scott Fitzgerald describes him) ‘one of the most powerful ends that ever played football at New Haven,’ had five-star acting chops and in the big dramatic showdown scenes between Gatsby and Tom, [and could] hold the screen against Leonardo DiCaprio.”

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Ben Affleck is out, Isla Fisher is (almost) in. Baz Luhrmann’s 3-D adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby will look something like this: Leonardo DiCaprio, Tobey Maguire and Carey Mulligan are a lock (as Jay Gatsby, Nick Carraway, Daisy Buchanan—just as Lurhmann has wanted it since October 2010).

Affleck has finally committed to his next directing gig, Argo, about the 1979 Iranian hostage crisis in the Middle East, so the actor won’t be donning ‘20s tweeds as Tom Buchanan. Fisher is in negotiations to play Myrtle, Buchanan’s married lover. The Warner Bros. production will kick off in Sydney, Australia this August.

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The Cannes International Film Festival 2011 line-up has been announced!

The movie calendar’s most glamorous festival is now less than a month away: it opens on May 11th, to be precise.

Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life, Jodie Foster’s The Beaver, Nicolas Winding-Refn’s Drive and, er, Rob Marshall’s Pirates of the Caribbean 4 are among the more mainstream movies in attendance.

Check out the full list of films here.

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Carey news is very slow at the moment, but I saw this little tidbit today and couldn’t resist sharing!

When Carey Mulligan was preparing for her Great Gatsby audition (she will be Daisy in Baz Luhrmann’s production) she asked Ashley and Mary-Kate for sartorial help – good call, Carey! ‘I couldn’t believe what they did when I texted in a panic about having nothing to wear for my audition for Gatsby! I was hoping they’d send me some things from The Row, but then these huge boxes arrived—Ashley’s entire collection of thirties vintage dresses.’ Petite in height but with oh-so-very-big hearts!

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Baz Luhrmann’s 3D take on The Great Gatsby will shoot in Sydney in August — beating out the iconic story’s home town of New York — after a deal was signed with the New South Wales (NSW) state government Friday, it was announced here Sunday.

The film is the first live-action 3D movie to be shot in NSW. Filming will take place at Sydney’s Fox Studios, with Warner Bros. backing the feature and Luhrmann’s Bazmark Films producing.

Leonardo DiCaprio will star as Jay Gatsby while Carey Mulligan has been offered the role of Daisy Buchanan.

Murmurs about a Sydney shoot have been swirling around the industry here for several weeks. Luhrmann’s last two features, Australia and Moulin Rouge were both shot at Fox Studios.

NSW Premier Kristina Kenneally said the film will inject AUS$120 million ($118 million) into the NSW economy, with the shoot to last 17 weeks and another 30 weeks to be spent on post production.

An estimated 275 crew will be employed during pre-production; more than 400 cast and crew will be employed during principal photography; and an estimated 150 post production and visual effects crew will also be employed.

Pre-production starts next month.

No details of the level of incentives provided to the film were immediately available but its a boost to the local industry with no big budget offshore features slated to shoot in Australia.

“This comes at a good time for the film industry,” Keneally said. “Australia was thought to be losing international filmmaking due to the strong Aussie dollar – put simply, this is a big win.”

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With the impending UK release of Never Let Me Go, the hauntingly enigmatic movie based on Kauzo Ishiguro’s acclaimed novel of the same name, here is an interview with Carey Mulligan who stars as the adult Kathy and the story’s narrator, a human clone and carer whose lifelong friendship with Keira Knightley’s Ruth and Andrew Garfield’s Tommy lies at the core of what’s a haunting love story and a devastating and desolate meditation on life and death and the loss of innocence. Never Let Me Go hits cinemas nationwide 11th February 2011. The film was released on DVD in the US Febuary 1st.

You’re a fan of not only of the book, Never Let Me Go, but of Kazuo Ishiguro’s writing in general, aren’t you?

Never Let Me Go is my favourite of Ishiguro’s novels, but I sort of love everything he’s written. It’s the lack of sentimentality and these unreliable narrators he creates, these people who can’t say exactly how they feel and so they reveal themselves without knowing. Everything he talks about is so small and beautiful and detailed and never sort of forces you into any sort of emotion but it’s completely overwhelming in spite of that.

I read [Never Let Me Go] in 2006 and then I read the script last year. Then it went away, like English films do, but then it came back in. She’s 31 in the book and I thought, that’s really annoying, I won’t be able to play her for ages and if they do a film soon I won’t ever get to play Kathy [because] I genuinely wanted to play it from the minute I read the book. But they moved it down to 26 in the script [and] it’s all worked out rather well for me.

What did you think of Alex Garland’s script when you first read it?

The minute I read [Kathy’s] voiceover I was sort of in. It was so beautiful and was exactly what Ishiguro wrote. The script’s so faithful to the book.

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For months we’ve heard that Moulin Rouge director Baz Luhrman has been workshopping an adaptation the F. Scott Fitzgerald classic The Great Gatsby with Leonardo DiCaprio and Tobey Maguire. Then there was a hotly contested casting search for the role of Daisy, with the role eventually going to Carey Mulligan. Finally, Luhrman mentioned he might shoot the film in 3D.

Now Luhrman, who has only directed four films since 1992, isn’t even sure he’s going to make the film. A final decision will be made by the end of the week.

Vulture caught up with the director at the Director’s Guild of America awards and asked him about the latest on The Great Gatsby.

I gotta make a decision in three days’ time [on] whether to do it or not.

But hasn’t he been working on the film for a long time?

I think I’ve been a bit shaded out because I want everything to be perfectly positioned on it, there will be news by the end of the week.

While Luhrman is the kind of perfectionist who probably would throw away an incredible cast and screenplay, in addition to the rights which he owns, I don’t think he will. He’s probably just saying this kind of thing as a bargaining chip so he can get a better deal. I know if I was a movie studio, and I had DiCaprio, Maguire and Mulligan all ready to go, and I heard my director was being flaky, I’d pay him what he wanted in order to get the project done.

If the project does come together by the end of the week, it wouldn’t be able to start for a few months anyway as DiCaprio is getting ready to shoot J. Edgar with Clint Eastwood.

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It’s the day of the premiere and confusion reigns inside the London hotel. TV cables are snaking down the corridors, photographers stand in huddles and the doors keep opening and shutting like a Feydeau farce. The press minders, meantime, have turned harried and irritable. “What time are we leaving, Jane?” barks one to the other. “It’s Kate,” Kate snaps back.

In all the hubbub it takes me a moment to register Carey Mulligan, hiding out on a window-seat with her back to the light. Her blond bob is scrunched, her make-up applied. At first glance, she might be a 14-year-old trying to pass for 18 at the local nightclub. Then she gets to her feet and is instantly transformed, looming 5ft 10in in her tottering heels. Her voice is in her boots; rich and deep, at least three octaves lower than it ought to be. Everything about her is quietly confounding.

In the course of a hectic six-year career, Mulligan has conspired to look both young and old, plain and beautiful. She was flyweight and mousy as Kitty Bennet in Pride & Prejudice, grave and soulful as Ada Clare in the BBC production of Bleak House; impishly vulnerable in her Oscar-nominated breakthrough in An Education, a broken bird when she played The Seagull on Broadway. I can’t tell whether she’s a wizened, watchful Miss Marple in the guise of a limpid ingénue, or the other way around. “I have a very forgettable face,” she explains ruefully. “I don’t look specific.”

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