Claire Denis Gearing Up To Helm English-Langague True-Crime Female Cannibal Thriller ‘The Soap Maker’ Next

French filmmaker Claire Denis (“High Life”) is now set to write and direct “The Soap Maker,” a true-crime thriller based on an Italian female serial killer who took the bodies of her victims and cooked them into things like soap (you might remember that “Fight Club” had some gross-out scenes about rendering human fat to make soap), cake, and cookies.

“The Soap Maker” is moving forward after it was first announced at the Berlin Film Market last year, and has a producing team that features Gerry Pass of Chrome Entertainment, Sacha Ben Harroche for Felix Culpa (“Butterfly Jam”), and Ivy Freeman-Attwood at Silkscreen. Felix Culpa’s Riley Keough and Gina Gammell are also set as executive producers.

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An original English-language pic co-written by Denis and Andrew Litvack it will be “inspired by the true story of Italy’s Leonarda Cianciulli, who in the late 1930s and early ’40s murdered three local women in the central Italian town of Correggio and disposed of their bodies with chemicals, using what was left to make soaps, candles, cookies, and cakes that she shared with people in her community.”

This wouldn’t be the first time the Cianciulli story has influenced cinematic iterations, as Italian director Mauro Bolognini drew inspiration for his 1977 cult movie “Gran Bollito” and starred veteran actress Shelley Winters as his version of the infamous serial killer. And hard not to imagine that the popular Hannibal Lecter books from author Thomas Harris didn’t take direct cues from those events as well that were later made into movies by Michael Mann, Jonathan Demme, and Ridley Scott.

Very disturbing subject matter, but it’s not like Denis doesn’t have a dark side in her work and could very well put together a very compelling film here with “The Soap Maker,” as CAA is handling the package. This year at Cannes, the director was presented with the honorary Golden Carriage (Carrosse d’Or) award during the Directors’ Fortnight.

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Denis plans to make the crime flick her next directorial effort, but we’ll have to wait a little longer to discover which actress the director will be casting in that meaty lead part.