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Before, again
Richard Linklater is playing the long game. The Texan filmmaker, whose body of work reaches from Slackers and School of Rock to A Scanner Darkly and the recently released Bernie, has reunited with actors Julie Delpy (2 Days in Paris) and Ethan Hawke (Training Day) to shoot the third installment of the Before series. The two actors will reprise their respective roles as Celine and Jesse, who met in Vienna as students in 1995’s Before Sunrise and were then reunited in Paris as unsettled adults for 2004’s Before Sunset, in a sequel that may be titled Before Midnight. As with the two previous films, the new romantic drama will unfold over the course of a single day, and shooting has reportedly already taken place in Greece.
Linklater’s stratagem, which has already resulted in two fine films each with a distinctive outlook, echoes Francois Truffaut’s pursuit of Antoine Doinel, the character played by Jean-Pierre Leaud that featured in five films between 1959 (The 400 Blows) and 1979 (Love on the Run). But it’s not the only project that finesses the passing of time that Linklater has going. Every year since 2002 Linklater has been convening a Texan shoot for a few weeks, filming a story that will follow a child from the start of primary school to departing for college, allowing him to use the same actors for the entire project as they age with the story’s progress. Ellar Salmon was cast as a seven-year-old in 2002, while Hawke and Patricia Arquette (True Romance) signed on to play his separated parents. The film, provisionally titled Boyhood, has only two years to go, and is scheduled to appear in 2015.
Trier fires up first US film
The talented Norwegian director Joachim Trier, whose two features Reprise and Oslo, August 31st have marked him as a director of considerable promise, is crossing the Atlantic. His next film will be an English language production set in America, telling the story of a family form the differing perspectives of its members. Trier should begin announcing cast members for Louder than Bombs shortly.
Connolly to ride high with Worthington
The director of The Bank and Balibo, Australian filmmaker Robert Connolly, appears to be returning to movies after a successful sojourn in television (The Slap, the forthcoming young Julian Assange telemovie Underground) with a screen adaptation of Tim Winton’s novel The Riders. Sam Worthington (Avatar) will play the Australian expatriate living in Ireland who goes to the airport to meet his wife and daughter and finds only the latter has arrived. His search for his partner, undertaken with his child, takes him across Europe. English actors Timothy Spall (The King’s Speech) and Charles Dance (The Last Action Hero) are slated to co-star.
Sheen goes meta with Murray
Most fascinating cast of the week: Charlie Sheen, Bill Murray, Jason Schwartzman and Patricia Arquette for A Glimpse Inside the Mind of Charles Swan III, the new film by Wes Anderson’s sometimes writing partner, Roman Coppola, which Mr. Sheen as Mr. Swan, a brokenhearted Hollywood playboy on a brokenhearted lost weekend. Bill Murray and the Ma-Sheen is a match made in… somewhere.
