Weerasethakul, Payne, and More

Tilda Swinton will star in Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s next feature, reports Jordan Raup at the Film Stage. “Titled Memoria, it will mark the Palme d’Or-winning director’s first film shot outside Thailand, with a 2019 production planned in Colombia. ‘During the 70s and 80s, it was very violent [in Colombia], much more than now . . . when you were driving, there could be a bomb and sometimes the traffic stops and you don’t know [why],’ the director told Screen Daily. ‘People imagine things and have a fear. The movie is about this, waiting for something you don’t know.’” Above: Swinton and Weerasethakul at the Doha Film Institute last week.

On Saturday, the Glasgow Short Film Festival will present an Apichatpong Weerasethakul All-Nighter from 11pm to 6am. “I always feel that seeing film is an event, of being in a certain kind of architecture, of looking at people, at the red curtains, at the dimming of the lights, etc,” Weerasethakul tells Philip Concannon at the Skinny. “It is performative. Sometimes the actual films are secondary. It’s the same feeling when I make films—now the process of making is more interesting than the finished films, which afterwards have their own lives.”

“Kristen Stewart is set to play iconic actress Jean Seberg in Against All Enemies,” reports Deadline’s Nancy Tartaglione. “A political thriller directed by Benedict Andrews (Una), the story is inspired by true events about the Breathless pixie who in the late 1960s was targeted by the illegal FBI surveillance program COINTELPRO. . . . Also starring are Jack O’Connell, Anthony Mackie, Margaret Qualley, and Colm Meaney. The original script is by Joe Shrapnel and Anna Waterhouse (The Aftermath,Edge of Tomorrow 2). The film will shoot this summer.”

As an excellent backgrounder, let me recommend “Jean and Jane,” Karina Longworth’s series that ran last fall on her outstanding podcast, You Must Remember This.

Alexander Payne is “in early talks” with Amazon Studios to direct The Burial, a “drama is based on the true legal exploits of Willie Gary, a successful personal-injury lawyer from Mississippi,” reports Deadline’s Mike Fleming Jr. Gary “takes on the case of Jeremiah O’Keefe, the owner of a local chain of funeral homes who claimed he had been swindled by a major funeral parlor conglomerate. The rags-to-riches lawyer turns it into a David vs. Goliath morality play.”

Nominations for the Premios Platino, launched in 2014 and “celebrating the best of Ibero-American cinema—and since last year, television series,” have been announced and Sebastián Lelio’s A Fantastic Woman leads with nine, reports Anna Marie de la Fuente for Variety. Lucrecia Martel’s Zama follows closely with eight, then Fernando Perez’s Last Days in Havana with seven, and Santiago Mitre’s The Summit and Isabel Coixet’s The Bookshop, with four each.

I bring this up because Francisco Reyes, who plays opposite Daniela Vega in A Fantastic Woman, will star in Martinez, “the directorial feature debut of Guadalajara native Lorena Padilla, a Tisch School of the Arts/NYU alum, who also penned the drama,” as Variety’s John Hopewell reports. “Reyes plays the titular Martinez, an embittered Chilean in his sixties who has lived in Mexico for the past forty years and is being forced to retire from his job. As he struggles with life changes, a neighbor suddenly dies and as he sifts through her diary and her things, he begins to live vicariously through her and find new meaning in life.”

Juliette Binoche has posted a selfie with a rainbow on Instagram: “Shooting Celle que vous croyez directed by Safy Nebbou, with Charles Berling.”

Madonna will direct Taking Flight, “a feature film based on the true story of Michaela DePrince, who grew up an orphan in war-torn Sierra Leone but rose to become a world-renowned ballerina,” reports Deadline’s Patrick Hipes.

And now, word on a project that may not happen, no matter how much so many of us might wish for it. “There is something about Before Midnight that feels like a complete circle,” Ethan Hawke said the other day at SXSW in Austin, as Zack Sharf reports at IndieWire. “The first film starts with a couple in their forties arguing on a train and the camera finds two young people listening to them. In the third film we kind of become that couple. It feels finished to me, which isn’t to say Rick or Julie is finished. If we were to visit Jesse and Celine, it would have to be in some new way. I don’t know what that would be, but it probably wouldn’t be called Before . . . something. I don’t know. It feels done.”

Series

“Monsoon Wedding and Queen of Katwe filmmaker Mira Nair is on the verge of completing a deal to direct the BBC and Lookout Point TV adaptation of Vikram Seth’s bestselling novel A Suitable Boy,” reports Andreas Wiseman for Deadline. “The series is being adapted by Emmy-winning screenwriter Andrew Davies, known for his work on the Bridget Jones franchise and TV hits such as the BBC’s War and Peace.”

Deadline’s Nellie Andreeva reports that David E. Kelley, the writer behind Big Little Lies, is re-teaming with Nicole Kidman and HBO for The Undoing, an adaptation of Jean Hanff Korelitz’s book You Should Have Known.

At IndieWire, Michael Schneier reports that, “after an intense bidding war,” Reese Witherspoon and Kerry Washington’s limited series Little Fires Everywhere, based on Celeste Ng’s book, has landed at Hulu.

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