The Asteroid City filmmaker Wes Anderson is onto pre-production work on his next film, with one out in cinemas and another coming later this year.
Wes Anderson is on a roll when it comes to productivity. The director currently has Asteroid City out in cinemas (you can find our review here). Furthermore, he’s also managed to sneak in an adaptation of Roald Dahl’s Henry Sugar, coming to Netflix later this year. We covered a story recently where he chats about that process, which you can find here.
Anderson isn’t resting on any laurels that may be chucked in his direction though. Instead, he’s heading into pre-production on his next film and has revealed a few details regarding what we can expect. The Playlist has compiled a couple of interviews that the filmmaker has given recently, including one with French outlet Le Monde where Anderson reveals that the film will star Benicio del Toro and ‘will focus on a father-daughter relationship and will sport a dark tone along with a linear timeline. In addition, del Toro will reportedly be “in every shot” of the movie.’
Anderson has acquired something of a repertory group over the course of his career so it’s no surprise he’s working with del Toro again following their collaboration on 2021’s The French Dispatch. Of course, there’s always the argument too that Anderson uses such huge ensembles in his films that by now, he might actually have run out of new actors.
Well, perhaps that’s a slight exaggeration as Michael Cera has also joined the project and that’s a first-time collaboration for the actor and Anderson.
On the process of pre-production, the report also covers a quote Anderson gave to Cahiers Du Cinema where he questions just how dark the tone of the film will ultimately be, saying “my intention was to make a particularly dark film. But while working on it, I’m heading in another direction, and it will probably be less dark than expected. It will be a lot about family, even more so than in Asteroid City”.
We love how Anderson seems to be stretching himself of late, in tone and in form. He’s always been a filmmaker who movies in new directions but this seems to be a particularly creatively fertile moment for him. We’ll bring you more on his next ‘espionage thriller’ project, including a title as we hear it.
