In the Works: Haynes, Weiner, and More

Todd Haynes is working on a documentary about the Velvet Underground, reports Variety’s John Hopewell. Speaking in Locarno, where he’s receiving the Pardo d’onore Manor for career achievement, Haynes says that he’ll “rely certainly on Warhol films but also a rich culture of experimental film, a vernacular we have lost and we don’t have, we increasingly get further removed from.” He’s looking forward to “getting in deep to the resources and material and stock and archival footage and the actual cinema and experimental work.” Hopewell: “Haynes also remarked that he is preparing a limited TV series with Amazon about ‘an intensely important figure of immense historical and cultural influence.’”

Mad Men creator Matthew Weiner has begun casting his followup for Amazon, The Romanoffs, reports Deadline’s Nellie Andreeva: Isabelle Huppert, Mad Men stars Christina Hendricks and John Slattery, Jack Huston, Amanda Peet, and Marthe Keller have been confirmed so far. The anthology series will be “set around the globe featuring separate stories about people who believe themselves to be descendants of the Russian royal family. Weiner is set to direct all episodes.”

Before Sunrise appeared in 1995, Before Sunset followed nine years later, and Before Midnight followed after another nine. “I would have said after the second there was definitely going to be a third one but I do feel complete in that the first one starts with the older couple arguing on the train and by the end of the third one we’ve become that couple,” Ethan Hawke tells Jacob Stolworthy in the Independent. Hawke, of course, co-stars with Julie Delpy and co-wrote the last two films in the trilogy with Delpy and director Richard Linklater. “If it were to continue, it would change shape. . . . We’re not allowed to think about it until five years after—that’s how we’ve done it every time.” And it’s only been four. But “we’re gonna meet five years after the release of Before Midnight, talk about it and see where we wind up.” Via Zack Sharf at IndieWire. On a related note, Alex Barrett has written up a Richard Linklater primer for the BFI.

Collider’s Matt Goldberg has asked Sicario screenwriter Taylor Sheridan about the sequel, Soldado: “When I told them I would write it, they asked for the traditional studio call and the outline and all that, and I said, ‘No, no, no, guys. The first one was original. I’m just going to go away and I’m going to come back with it and there you go.’ And they trusted me to do that, and then read it and were like, ‘Ah, shit. We’re in a lot of trouble.’ It makes the first one look like a comedy. Yeah. I’m not the guy to ask to write a sequel.” Via Michael Nordine at IndieWire.

Variety’s Nick Vivarelli reports that Alice Rohrwacher (The Wonders) begins shooting Lazzaro Felice today “in the central Italian countryside near Civita di Bagnoregio, a scenic ancient village perched on an eroding tufa rock plateau.” The film starring Sergi Lopez, Nicoletta Braschi, and Rohrwacher’s sister Alba is “about a man living on the margins of society who travels through time.”

At Ioncinema, Eric Lavallée has notes on several films going into production this month, including Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman, Kleber Mendonça Filho and Juliano Dornelles’s Bacurau, Asghar Farhadi’s untitled project, Ben Wheatley’s Freakshift, and Christoph Waltz’s Georgetown.

Responding to HBO’s request that everyone just chill and wait to see what sort of show Confederate will actually be, Ta-Nehisi Coates argues in the Atlantic that “we need not wait to note that more interesting than asking what the world would be like if the white South had won is asking why so many white people are enthralled with a world where the dreams of Harriet Tubman were destroyed by the ambitions of Robert E. Lee.”

For news and items of interest throughout the day, every day, follow @CriterionDaily.

You have no items in your shopping cart