Richard Linklater works at such a pace that, with two films now in theaters, it’s a little surprising there hasn’t been word on the next thing. For some time, though, he’s been planning a film concerning transcendentalism, a literary movement that includes (allow me one moment to return to sophomore-year classes) Walt Whitman, Louisa May Alcott, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Henry David Thoreau––I imagine at least one of you is also picturing a Penguin Classics cover right this second––and is a project whose public record goes back to a 2014 New Yorker profile.
In a new interview with Filmmaker Magazine, Linklater said the film––about the “hippies of the 1830s and 40s, the beginnings of feminism, environmentalism, abolitionism, all that,” and a kind of 19th-century hangout movie––is, after “20-something years,” due for arrival. It’s long been known Ethan Hawke would be involved; here he clarified it’s as Emerson, while Natalie Portman hopes to play Margaret Fuller and Oscar Isaac is at least tangentially involved. While such a project doesn’t seem like every financier’s dream, per Linklater, “I think it might be coming together. People feel a certain urgency to help it in a way that I’m grateful for.” Perhaps some awards push on Blue Moon and Nouvelle Vague will engender the right development.
Meanwhile, Lynne Ramsay might be breaking her once-every-decade pace. Speaking to Indiewire, the Die My Love auteur revealed her Joaquin Phoenix- and Rooney Mara-led Polaris is still in process, albeit with an original script requiring “a little bit of shaping.” Last year she told Another Magazine that it’s “Rosemary’s Baby in the Arctic” and (maybe mixing metaphors just a tad) features Phoenix as an “Ahab-like” figure; on the cetology tip, “there’s a fantastic cut in it that moves from the circle of a burning whale’s eye to a shot from above of children waltzing.” Set at the turn of the 20th century, it boasts “dark ecological themes.”
Meanwhile, Stone Mattress, a Margaret Atwood adaptation supported by Amazon with Sandra Oh and Julianne Moore involved, continues hanging in the air, but with logistical complications one only thinks about in the heart of making a film: “It’s a boat and a cruise to the Arctic. […] You need to book it one year in advance, and pay a massive deposit.” Like Linklater coming off Blue Moon and Nouvelle Vague, Ramsay might have enough gas in the tank to render such difficulties nil. Surely MUBI’s Sequoia-packed coffers can be dipped into?