It’s not unusual to see a flurry of announcements for new projects as a major festival like Cannes opens, but heavens. The biggest and most pleasant surprise has to be that Alain Resnais, who turns 90 on June 3 and, of course, will see his newest film, You Ain’t Seen Nothin’ Yet! (trailer), premiere in Competition on Monday, is already setting up his next project. Aimer, boire et chanter will be a comedy based on Alan Ayckbourn’s play Life of Riley, reports Elsa Keslassy: “Jean-Louis Livi, who is producing via his Paris-based F Comme Film, tells Variety that Chanter is a comedy in the vein of Smoking/No Smoking, also based on an Ayckbourn play. Cast has yet to be locked. ‘With Alain every film is very different,’ said Livi. ‘[You Ain’t Seen Nothin’ Yet!] deals with life, love, death and the hereafter, while Chanter will be an uplifting comedy with some acid moments.'” Resnais will once again collaborate on the screenplay with Laurent Herbiet and shooting is scheduled for early 2013.
Sticking with France for the moment, Screen‘s Melanie Goodfellow reports that Bertrand Bonello (House of Tolerance) will direct a biopic on French fashion designer Yves Saint Laurent, focusing on the years between 1965 and 1976. Thomas Bidegain, who co-wrote The Prophet and Rust and Bone with Jacques Audiard, will collaborate with Bonello on the screenplay.
John Woo will direct and produce a remake of Seijun Suzuki‘s Youth of the Beast (1963), and Nancy Tartaglione has the press release at Deadline London. Woo: “This remake is my salute to the great films and filmmakers produced by Nikkatsu’s 100 years in cinema history.”
Terrence Malick’s “forthcoming, long-untitled film with Ben Affleck and Rachel McAdams (one of three he’ll be putting out over the next couple of years) will henceforth be known as To the Wonder,” reports Sean O’Neal at the AV Club: “It’s been rumored as even more experimental than The Tree of Life, even though it has a fairly straightforward plotline about Affleck as a philanderer who has a ‘hot-and-heavy’ affair—hence its R rating for ‘some sexuality/nudity’—that leads to a green card marriage with a European woman, only to have his life further complicated after he begins to have feelings for a longtime acquaintance (played by McAdams) in his Oklahoma hometown.”
Aaron Sorkin will be writing the adaptation of Walter Isaacson’s bestselling biography Steve Jobs, reports Chris Eggertsen at HitFix.
Greg Mottola may be adapting Jeffrey Eugenides’s novel The Marriage Plot for producer Scott Rudin. Angie Han has details and background at /Film.
With a little financial help from Screen Australia, Nash and Joel Edgerton will be turning Nash’s 2005 short Lucky into a feature and Julia Leigh will adapt her 2008 novel, Disquiet. Simon Dang has details at the Playlist, where Kevin Jagernauth reports that Scott Z. Burns, who wrote Contagion and The Bitter Pill for Steven Soderbergh, will be writing the sequel to the surprise hit of last summer, Rise of the Planet of the Apes.
“Hot on the heels of the announcement that spooky Isabelle Fuhrman will headline David Gordon Green’s long-discussed-but-now-actually-happening Suspiria remake, comes word that several more actors have joined the cast,” notes Drew Taylor, also at the Playlist. “ScreenDaily reports that international treasure Isabelle Huppert has joined the cast of Suspiria alongside Janet McTeer, Michael Nyqvist and Antje Traue.”
At Movies.com, Alison Nastasi reports that, in his capacity as a professor at NYU, James Franco will be “overseeing a poetry-inspired project for NYU grad students that will result in two anthology features, according to indieWIRE. Award-winning American poet C.K. Williams’s 1983 book Tar—set around the poet’s experience with the Three Mile Island nuclear-reactor accident—and Stephen Dobyns’s National Poetry Series award-winner Black Dog, Red Dog will be the focus of the works…. Talents like Jessica Chastain and Mila Kunis are already flocking to the Williams project, while Olivia Wilde, Chloe Sevigny, and Whoopi Goldberg are focused on the Dobyns work.”
“Sony Pictures Classics has acquired North American rights to Susanne Bier’s romantic comedy Love Is All You Need, starring Pierce Brosnan,” reports indieWIRE‘s Nigel M. Smith. “The film marks her follow-up to her Academy Award-winner In a Better World.” Also cast: Trine Dyrholm and Paprika Steen.
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