French director Quentin Dupieux has begun shooting his 12th feature film DAAAAAALI ! with a star ensemble French cast including Alain Chabat (Smoking Causes Coughing), Anaïs Demoustier (Alice And The Mayor), Pierre Niney (Frantz) and Gilles Lellouche (Little White Lies).
The picture charts the story of a French journalist who meets iconic, Surrealist artist Salvador Dali on a number of occasions for a documentary project which never gets off the ground.
Deadline, which has been tracking this project, has heard Dali will be played by multiple different actors across the course of the film.
Dupieux, who also goes under the alias of his DJ name Mr. Oizo, announced the start of the shoot on his Instagram account on Tuesday.
Other cast members named in his post included Edouard Baer (Adieu Paris), Pio Marmaï (The Divide), Jonathan Cohen, Hakim Jemili, Agnès Hurstel, Jérôme Niel, Marc Fraize and Didier Flamand.
The post suggested there could be further cast announcements to come. Deadline had heard that Oscar-winning The Artist star Jean Dujardin and Louis Garrel (The Dreamers) but they were missing from Dupieux’s Instagram reveal.
Thomas Verhaeghe at Paris-based Atelier de Production is lead producing the French-language project. Paris-based Kinology is handling international sales. Diaphana has taken French rights.
The 10-week shoot will take place in Paris, the South of France and Spain.
Dupieux, whose work is also often described as surreal, is best known internationally for Cannes Directors’ Fortnight title Deerskin and Venice 2020 breakout Mandibles, about two goofy no-hopers who discover a giant fly in the trunk of their car.
More recent titles include Berlinale 2022 Gala title Incredible But True and Smoking Causes Coughing, which debuted in Cannes’ Midnight section this year. Dupieux has long professed his fascination with Dali and the Surrealism movement and confirmed over the summer that he would be making a film about the artist.
Incredible But True, about a suburban couple whose lives are upturned when they find a mysterious tunnel in their basement, even seem to reference Luis Buñuel and Dali’s 1929 silent short film Un Chien Andoulou in a scene in which the wife sees ants coming out of her hands.
Dali was the subject of recent movie Daliland starring Ben Kingsley and Ezra Miller, which played at Toronto.