After his overlooked procedural Dark Waters, Todd Haynes is moving full steam ahead on a number of projects. He’ll premiere his documentary The Velvet Underground at Cannes Film Festival followed by an Apple TV+ release, and he recently set his Wonderstruck star Michelle Williams to lead his Peggy Lee biopic Fever. However, it looks like another reunion is in the works that will kick off production sooner.
Julianne Moore, who worked with Haynes on the aforementioned Wonderstruck, as well as Safe and Far From Heaven, will reteam with the director for a new drama titled May December, also starring Natalie Portman. Scripted by Samy Burch with a story by Burch and Alex Mechanik, production will kick off next year as the project gets shopped at the Cannes market. Check out the synopsis below via Deadline.
Twenty years after their notorious tabloid romance gripped the nation, Gracie Atherton-Yu and her husband Joe (twenty-three years her junior) brace themselves for their twins to graduate from high school. When Hollywood actress Elizabeth Berry comes to spend time with the family to better understand Gracie, who she will be playing in a film, family dynamics unravel under the pressure of the outside gaze. Joe, never having processed what happened in his youth, starts to confront the reality of life as an empty-nester at thirty-six. And as Elizabeth and Gracie study each other, the similarities and differences between the two women begin to ebb and flow. Set in picturesque and comfortable Camden, Maine, May December is an exploration of truth, storytelling, and the difficulties (or impossibility) of fully understanding another person.
“What so appealed to me about Samy Burch’s exceptional script was how it navigated potentially volatile subject matter with a kind of observational patience that allowed the characters in the story to be explored with uncommon subtlety,” said director Todd Haynes.
As we await the film, check out Michael Snydel and Caden Mark Gardner’s discussion of Safe on Intermission below.