Can a movie have Oscar buzz before anyone’s turned on the camera? Yes, when it’s led by this powerhouse troika: Academy Award winners Julianne Moore and Natalie Portman are prepping a new drama with director Todd Haynes, Variety reports. The upcoming film, May December, will mark the fifth collaboration between Moore and Haynes, but the first time either of them has worked with Portman.
In the film, Portman will play an actress who travels up to “the picturesque coast of Maine” to study Moore, who plays the person upon whom Portman’s next character is based. (May December is not based on a true story, so neither Portman nor Moore have to make any life-reflecting-art trips before Haynes calls action.)
Here’s what else we know: Moore’s character was previously at the center of a tabloid scandal for marrying a man 23 years younger than she, and that is presumedly what the movie-within-the-movie will be about. Portman entering the family bubble, just as they prepare to send their twins to college, leads to … something. Considering Haynes’s other films, like Carol and Far From Heaven, we predict some beautiful melodrama might be in the works.
May December’s script is from Samy Burch, a woman whose career started in the casting department on independent films and notable flicks including The Hunger Games. She is now an in-demand screenwriter and according to the Internet Movie Database, one of the many credited writers on an in-development Wile E. Coyote movie for Warner Bros., based on a 1990 New Yorker humor piece “Coyote vs. ACME” by Ian Frazier.
Todd Haynes’s next project, the rock documentary The Velvet Underground, will debut at next month’s Cannes Film Festival before heading to Apple TV +. Haynes and Moore’s collaborations stretch back to the 1995 film Safe, followed by Far From Heaven (for which she received an Academy Award nomination for best actress), I’m Not There (in which she played a Joan Baez-esque singer), and Wonderstruck.
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