ROB ZOMBIE Offers Update On 'Broad Street Bullies' Film (Video)

Rocker-turned-filmmaker Rob Zombie recently spoke to Artisan News about his next film project as a writer and director, "Broad Street Bullies", about the Philadelphia Flyers hockey team of the 1970s that were famous for beating the Soviet Union's team at the time and notorious for their violent tactics on the ice. You can watch the report below.

Asked about where the movie's current status, Zombie said: "As of right now, the script is done, 'cause that was a long process, putting a script together. And we're just sort of putting the financing together, putting the structure of the film together, all the boring stuff, and also beginning the early process of casting, trying to figure out who's gonna play who and what's gonna happen. Which is tricky, 'cause a lot of actors can't skate that good."

He added: "My theory is that, actually, nobody's gonna be able to learn to play to the level we're gonna need them to play at, to make the scenes believable. You can easily fake being able to play baseball or football. But hockey? I don't know… Those guys are such superior athletes that I think we're gonna need to find actors who are already good skaters or players who are good actors."

In a recent interview with Philly.com, Zombie stated about his decision to make the "Broad Street Bullies" film: "It's the greatest sports story ever not told. It's been told other ways, but not film. I had to do it. It reads like fiction. It's so incredible."

Zombie plans to shoot most of the movie in Philadelphia.

"It's almost like 'Rocky', but it's real," he said. "When you watch 'Rocky', you go, 'God, I wish that was real.' It's sort of like 'Boogie Nights' meets 'Rocky'. I know from the five-minute conversation [with the ex-Flyers] there's a lot of good stuff besides hockey going on.

"It's a character-driven movie," he added. "There's such great characters. To just make a movie about hockey, hockey fans will love it, but nobody else will. The characters are so great that — not to keep going back to 'Rocky' — even if you hate boxing, you love the movie because the characters are so great. This has incredible characters, except they're real."

The Flyers, who went from a cellar-dwelling expansion team to winners of back-to-back Stanley Cups, were previously chronicled in an HBO documentary, also called "Broad Street Bullies".

The movie will mark Zombie's first foray outside horror films, with his resume so far consisting of projects like "House Of 1000 Corpses", "Halloween" and the upcoming "The Lords Of Salem".

Zombie told The Pulse Of Radio a while back that it's been tough for him to break out of the horror movie genre. "The movies I've made up to this point have been pretty dark and pretty much in that world because those are the opportunities that were presented," he said. "You know, the people that put up the money for these things know that if I stick to that sort of thing, it's easily more profitable. So it's a much bigger challenge to break out of it."