Let this be a lesson, like David Berman once sang, that a setback can be a set-up for a comeback if you don’t let up. Five years after Under the Silver Lake got befuddled notices at Cannes and four since A24 buried it like a cursed heirloom (remind me to tell you a funny story about that if we ever meet IRL), David Robert Mitchell has found a major return to feature filmmaking. IMAX-sized, even: Deadline report he’ll direct Anne Hathaway in an untitled, logline-free, IMAX-shot “thrill-ride” for Warner Bros. and Bad Robot. Production is expected to commence this fall.
It’d be less strange if we weren’t in a climate that fast-tracks independent filmmakers from Sundance premiere to gormless, taste-free franchise filmmaking, but Mitchell’s path––from micro-scale Myth of the American Sleepover to Pynchon-aping Silver Lake, with cult-horror object It Follows right in-between––is all the more sui generis for its slow progression marked by a seeming dead end. So one hopes this is less managers, agents, producers, and executives all descending upon talent with an offer they can’t refuse and more a unique figure having time and patience to play on the larger canvas.
Rumors have already started pegging it as an 80-set dinosaur feature, however those things combine. Being that Mitchell’s work often seeks some element (a Carpenter-like score here, some gumshoe mystery there) that removes it from the contemporary moment, the suggestion rings plausible. But we’ll see.