In the Works: Welles, Varda, and More

Before we turn to the features and series that haven’t been made yet, we’ve got two items worth making note of here. First, as Wellesnet editor Ray Kelly reports, “The Other Side of the Wind had its first screening on Tuesday, January 16, in Santa Monica, California—forty-two years after principal photography concluded on Orson Welles’s legendary movie. . . . What was shown at the ‘friends & family screening’ was far more advanced than a rough cut, but it was not a finished film.” Among those attending were “directors Quentin Tarantino and Rian Johnson; actors Danny Huston (son of the film's star, John Huston) and Crispin Glover; and The Other Side of the Wind cast and crew members Peter Bogdanovich, Lou Race, Neil Canton and Peter Jason.” Netflix, which now holds worldwide distribution rights, would like to have the final version ready for Cannes in May.

Kelly also points us to Deadline’s interview with Morgan Neville in which Dominic Patten asks about They’ll Love Me When I’m Dead, the doc he working on about Welles and The Other Side of the Wind. Neville notes that it’s “presented this incredible opportunity of Welles telling his own story through a film, and I get to tell a story about Welles through his film, through my film. So it gets a little meta, to say the least.” The Other Side’s producers, “Frank Marshall and Filip Rymsza, are my executive producers, too.” But “the thing about the film was that Orson shot it for six years and he kept squirreling away characters, and re-casting. So I feel like most of what I’m going to use isn’t even going to be in their film.”

Secondly, Arbelos Films is at work on a new 4K restoration of Béla Tarr’s “432-minute opus” Sátántangó (1994) “which will be re-released in theaters early next year with a Blu-ray/VOD release to follow,” reports Michael Nordine for IndieWire.

Features

Following Faces Places, Agnès Varda’s next project, an untitled documentary she’ll co-direct with Didier Rouget, “will shed light on her experience as a director, bringing a personal insight to what she calls ‘cine-writing,’ traveling from Rue Daguerre in Paris to Los Angeles and Beijing,” reports Variety’s Elsa Keslassy.

Meantime, Keslassy is calling Olivier Assayas’s next film Non Fiction—not E-Book, the film we’ve been anticipating, though they’re quite clearly one and the same, “a light-hearted and ironic look at the rapidly-changing world of book publishing through the relationship between an editor [Guillaume Canet] and an author [Vincent Macaigne] who are both in over their heads, struggling to cope with their middle-age crisis, the digital transformation of the publishing industry and their wives’s ([Juliette] Binoche, and Nora Hamzawi, respectively) changing desires.”

According to Deadline’s Mike Fleming Jr., in Quentin Tarantino’s next project, Leonardo DiCaprio will play “an actor who had his own Western show, Bounty Law, that ran on the air from 1958 to 1963. His attempt to transition to movies didn’t work out and in 1969—the film is set at the height of hippy Hollywood movement—he’s guesting on other people’s shows while contemplating going to Italy which has become a hotbed for low-budget Westerns.”

Goran Dukic (Wristcutters: A Love Story) will direct Rachel Weisz in Cloud One, “a grounded sci-fi movie,” reports Variety’s Justin Kroll.

Jessica Chastain and Octavia Spencer will star as “two women fighting the elements to make it home for Christmas” in an as-yet-untitled comedy, report Kroll and Brent Lang.

Series

Kristen Wiig will star in a comedy she’ll executive produce with Reese Witherspoon for Apple, reports Variety’s Joe Otterson. “The ten-episode, half-hour comedy is inspired by Curtis Sittenfeld’s upcoming short story collection You Think It, I’ll Say It.”

Agnieszka Holland and Kasia Adamik have begun shooting the first Polish Netflix series, “set in a world where the Iron Curtain never fell,” reports Film New Europe, noting that it doesn’t yet have a title.

“Michael Wolff’s controversial Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House is coming to television.” There aren’t many details yet, but Lesley Goldberg and Andy Lewis have the story in the Hollywood Reporter.

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