One year after his 80th birthday and with a new lease on life, Peter Greenaway’s begun shooting his first feature since 2015’s Eisenstein in Guanajuato with a cast that suggests your parents might see it at their local arthouse. Per Variety, Dustin Hoffman and Helen Hunt will lead Lucca Mortis, wherein the former plays a “New York writer (Hoffman), who in 2001, following the attack on the Twin Towers in New York, takes a sabbatical to visit Lucca in search of his distant Italian origins.” Hunt’s role remains unlisted.
Greenaway’s film is expected to draw “a sort of parallelism between the Twin Towers and the towers of Lucca,” exactly the kind of overweening metaphor that could yield something oddly profound. And his longstanding interest in architecture seems key to this project: Lucca Mortis is expected to use 25 locations, “some in private historic buildings” because a €15 million budget can do much heavy lifting on location work. With shooting already underway, one might expect a 2024 premiere.