As has become the ritual for any Paul Thomas Anderson picture, after a brief trade announcement giving very little details, set photos are now pouring in, launching a trail of breadcrumbs fit for the sleuthing likes of Doc Sportello. After revealing production would kick off in Eureka, California under the name “BC Project,” star Leonardo DiCaprio has been spotted sporting quite the look, joined by a co-star.
As one can see below, DiCaprio is filming a scene at a restaurant alongside an actress revealed to be newcomer Chase Infiniti, according to Daniel Richtman. While he can often be off the mark with his rumors, doing a bit more digging on her official site and Instagram and the resemblance certainly matches. Infiniti is a recent graduate of Columbia College Chicago Theatre’s Musical Theatre Performance BFA program and her only other credit is a role in the forthcoming Presumed Innocent series.
The set image was first posted by Victor Tapia on Facebook from Carmela’s Mexican Restaurant, north of Eureka:
The casting has also further fueled much speculation that Paul Thomas Anderson is taking on a contemporary update of Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland, shifting its 1984-set depiction of Reagan’s reign of terror to the MAGA state of today. If this proves to be the case, we would imagine DiCaprio takes the lead Zoyd Wheeler role, Regina Hall is Frenesi Gates, Chase Infiniti is their daughter Prairie, and Sean Penn plays the villainous Brock Vond.
As much as I admire Pynchon’s genre-hopping novel––and hold firm that PTA’s previous Pynchon adaptation, Inherent Vice, is his finest achievement––an updated Vineland doesn’t necessarily jive with reports that this $100 million project is the director’s most commercial outing yet. As we await more details and casting for what is said to be a large ensemble, here’s the synopsis of Vineland as a refresher, and one can find more from Infiniti and snaps from the production below.
Vineland, a zone of blessed anarchy in northern California, is the last refuge of hippiedom, a culture devastated by the sobriety epidemic, Reaganomics, and the Tube. Here, in an Orwellian 1984, Zoyd Wheeler and his daughter Prairie search for Prairie’s long-lost mother, a Sixties radical who ran off with a narc. Vineland is vintage Pynchon, full of quasi-allegorical characters, elaborate unresolved subplots, corny songs (“Floozy with an Uzi”), movie spoofs (Pee-wee Herman in The Robert Musil Story), and illicit sex (including a macho variation on the infamous sportscar scene in V.).