If the four-year gap between Frank Ocean’s debut studio album Channel Orange and his follow-ups Endless and Blonde felt long, it’s now been over double the wait to see if another album will ever materialize from the wunderkind artist. We now have a major update on Ocean’s creative output, but rather than a new album in the works, he’s started shooting his directorial debut.

Variety reports David Jonsson (Alien: Romulus, Rye Lane) has landed the lead role of Ocean’s directorial debut, which Ocean also wrote and is now shooting in Mexico City. While no plot details have arrived, a bit more digging reveals the current title is Philly and shooting actually began in mid-December. As seen below, Ocean was also spotted in Mexico City this past summer shooting footage. Earlier rumors suggested A24 and Taylor Russell were involved in the project, but that has yet to be confirmed.

It’s not Ocean’s first brush with filmmaking as cinematography Sam Levy revealed to us back in 2017, “I was hired by Spike Jonze to go on tour with him and Frank and do the live show video. So, Spike and I both operated on stage with Frank. We each had four different cameras. One was an ALEXA. One was an Ikonoskop, this Swedish camera that is no longer made. One was a MiniDV camera which Spike used to shoot his skate videos with and I used to shoot experimental art films with. And then one was an infrared camera. For each song, we would each have different cameras that get fed to this master board that get transmitted to the stadium IMAG screens. There was this brilliant guy mixing everything together. So that already happened, like the tour happened, the live video happened. Then I think Frank and Spike are using all the footage to make something else. Honestly, I don’t really know much about what they are doing. They are going to do something with it. I’m waiting to find out myself.”

While that project never saw the light of day, Ocean did reveal a list of his favorite films timed with the release of Blonde, including works by Andrei Tarkovsky, David Lynch, Ingmar Bergman, Stanley Kubrick, Martin Scorsese, Orson Welles, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Jean Cocteau, Alfred Hitchcock, Francis Ford Coppola, Fritz Lang, Werner Herzog, Akira Kurosawa, Ridley Scott, Bernardo Bertolucci, Sergei Eisenstein, F. W. Murnau, Luis Buñuel, and more. We greatly look forward to what’s in store for his debut.

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