As Kirsten Dunst gears up for her directorial debut next year with an adaptation of Sylvia Plath’s landmark 1963 novel The Bell Jar, she’s been expanding her cast. With Dakota Fanning on board to lead as Esther Greenwood, Jesse Plemons recently joined, and now ScreenDaily reports that Oscar-winner Patricia Arquette, Bel Powley (The Diary Of A Teenage Girl) and Stacy Martin (Nymphomaniac) have all been added to the ensemble. The story follows Greenwood, who suffers from a mental illness, returning to her Boston home after interning at a magazine in New York City. Production begins early next year for a hopeful festival premiere later in 2017.
In other cast expansions, production has now begun on David Robert Mitchell‘s follow-up to It Follows, the Andrew Garfield-led modern-day noir thriller Under the Silver Lake. We got word earlier this week that Riley Keough (American Honey, Mad Max: Fury Road) had replaced Dakota Johnson and Topher Grace (Interstellar, That ’70s Show) has joined, and now the ensemble has expanded even further.
Zosia Mamet (Girls), Jimmi Simpson (Westworld), Patrick Fischler (Mulholland Drive), Callie Hernandez, Riki Lindome, Luke Baines, and Don McManus have all joined the film, which follows [Update: logline removed at the producer’s request.] While Deadline doesn’t give any character details, A24 will likely distributor this one next year, so stay tuned.
Lastly, director Guillaume Nicloux is once again teaming with his Valley of Love and The End star Gerard Depardieu for a new drama. Also starring Gaspard Ulliel (It’s Only the End of the World), the war drama is titled Les Confins du Monde (aka The Confines of the World), according to Variety, and follows “the life of a military chief in the 1940s Indochina war and recounts his love affair with a Vietnamese woman.” Based on Erwan Bergot’s Commando Vandenberghe: Le Pirate du Delta, and scripted by the director and Jerome Beaujour, production begins this spring on location in Vietnam.