New Tykwer Film: Perfume gets Dustin Hoffman and Alan Rickman

Screendaily is reporting that production is about to start on a new Tom Tykwer film. Being a huge fan of Run Lola Run, The Princess and the Warrior, and the underrated Heaven, the sooner this European co-production gets going the better. Perfume has had a bit of a troubled production history. It seems that at one point, Ridley Scott was attached to direct, then Julian Schnabel took a crack at it, and tried to get Johnny Depp.
This time around Tykwer has gone a bit hollywood in his casting, with Dustin Hoffman in the lead role. The villian in the piece is the always fantastic Alan Rickman. No Sign of Ms. Potente anywere in this production, which is a shame. Shooting is set to start July 12th in Spain, France and Germany.

Here is Penguin Publishing's blurb on the novel:
"Perfume takes place in eighteenth-century France and is about a man, Jean-Baptiste Grenouille, who had no scent of his own but had been gifted with the most extraordinary sense of smell.
Jean-Baptiste Grenouille was born in 1738 in Paris, in the most horrid conditions, and was abandoned by his mother. Brought up by a succession of wet nurses, he started working for a tanner who, when Grenouille was thirteen, allowed him to go out and wander around the streets of Paris for one hour every day. It was then that Grenouille started his quest for the perfect smell and, with it, began his reign of terror.
Perfume is a bizarre, hypnotic and absolutely brilliant tale of horror. The depictions of the decadence of 18th century France are so vivid, you can almost smell the reek of the age and Grenouille is a mesmerising character, whose gift from God also proves to be his greatest weapon against good. "