Filmmaker Richard Linklater is on a tear. Earlier this month, he released his “Hit Man” film on Netflix, and just a few weeks ago, according to recent interviews, he finished shooting his French New Wave movie, “Nouvelle Vague,” which should be ready for some time in 2025, but there’s more: a new project called, “Blue Moon” which will reunite him with longtime collaborator Ethan Hawke.
Sony Pictures Classics has already acquired the film, and it has a huge starry cast. On top of Hawke, which will be his ninth collaboration with the actor, “Blue Moon” will star Margaret Qualley (“The Substance”), Bobby Cannavale (“Ezra”) and Andrew Scott (“All Of Us Strangers,” and “Ripley”). This is definitely the “secret project” with Hawke that Linklater has been teasing over the last few months.
Filming will take place this summer in Dublin, Ireland. “Blue Moon” was written by Robert Kaplow, author of the novel “Me and Orson Welles,” which Linklater adapted into his own film in 2009.
“Blue Moon” will profile the final days of Lorenz Hart, part of the classic songwriting team Rodgers & Hart, active from the 1920s to the 1940s. The film is set primarily in Sardi’s Restaurant on March 31, 1943, the opening night of “Oklahoma!,” which marked Rodgers’s first collaboration with Oscar Hammerstein II as Hart’s replacement. The title of the song comes from one of their most famous songs (listen to a version below).
“Robert, Ethan, and I have been developing this story for over a decade and are excited and grateful that the time has come to bring this to life,” Linklater said in a statement about the film’s long-in-development process.
Sony Pictures Classics, who have been part of a number of Linklater films going back as far as “Slacker,” said in a statement, “Almost a year ago, Rick, Ethan, and John reached out to us with Robert Kaplow’s amazing script BLUE MOON. Helping them over the following months to bring it together has been incredibly exciting, and now, on the verge of production, with this fantastic cast and crew in place and Rick at the helm, we are thrilled to finally announce it and bring the film to audiences everywhere in the world.”
Linklater’s “Nouvelle Vague” film will arrive first though. It stars Zoey Deutch as Jean Seberg and revolves around the making of the Jean-Luc Godard classic French New Wave film “Breathless” (1960). The film is mostly filled with young unknown French actors, Guillaume Marbeck as Godard, Aubry Dullin as Jean-Paul Belmondo, etc. etc.