With Hollywood still under lockdown, projects that are being postponed now are going to clash with projects planned for the near future, leading to countless complications for the industry at large.
One such filmmaker feeling the ramifications of the lockdown is Chilean filmmaker Pablo Larraín, who was supposed to be filming “Lisey’s Story” with Julianne Moore for AppleTV+, but that was all before the lockdown hit.
During a Cannes market conversation with MUBI founder Efe Cakarel (via IndieWire), Larraín, who just sold his Princess Diana biopic “Spencer” starring Kristen Stewart to Neon out of the Cannes market, opened up about his adaptation of Stephen King‘s “Lisey’s Story” being interrupted. “We were [shooting] for six months in a row and we had a few weeks left, and we had to stop, so I guess we’re wondering and seeing how we restart, how are those conditions. I don’t have clarity today,” Larraín said.
“Lisey’s Story” tells the story of a widow as she deals with the devastating loss of her husband, at the same time as she discovers portions of her husband’s life that she either forgot or repressed. The show doesn’t have a release date yet, but with the delay in production, it won’t be coming out soon.
Larraín’s worries don’t just stop with the delay in production for his own film during the lockdown, but what lifting restrictions in cinemas will mean for indie movies at large. “My concern is almost like a poetic darkness in terms of what happened with those movies that don’t get wide distribution because the cinemas are full of these major superhero movies?” the filmmaker said. “What happened to those movies that used to have distribution and those movies aren’t bought by distributors? It’s like a cemetery of cinema. It’s terrible. I’m worried about those movies that don’t have a place and deserve to exist because they change culture. It’s a little bit disturbing.”
In addition to “Spencer” and “Lisey’s Story,” Larraín is also producing Claudia Llosa‘s Netflix‘s film “Fever Dream” based on a short collection by Samanta Schweblin.
