“To be honest, the idea of freedom scares me:” Produced and presented by filmmaker Roman Coppola (“Mozart in the Jungle,” “A Glimpse Inside the Mind of Charles Swan III,” and a regular Wes Anderson co-writer), eight different filmmakers come together to collectively direct “The Seven Faces of Jane,” in which the titular protagonist (played by Gillian Jacobs, who also directs) undergoes a series of life-altering changes, as she drives away from her “mundane life into an exciting odyssey on the road.”
The idea is essentially a cinematic exquisite corpse, the game invented by French surrealists, where one person writes a fragment of a sentence, the next person reads some of it, and tries to add onto it from there; essentially an experimental game of passing the baton with art.
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Of the eight directors, a few come from Hollywood royalty, with Gia Coppola and Xan Cassavetes carrying the torches handed to them by their famous grandfather and father, respectively. The other directors include Boma Iluma, Ryan Heffington, Julian J. Acosta, Ken Jeong, Alex Takacs, and the aforementioned Jacobs. Here’s the official synopsis:
Jane’s obstacles, connections, and moments were created playing a game of exquisite corpse—a method of creating art by collectively assembling random parts to create a whole.” Invented by the surrealists, exquisite corpse, which comes from the French term “cadavre exquis,” is an exercise in which a collection of words or images are collectively assembled. The resulting artwork can be a long-winded and absurd poem, a drawing of a body with disparate body parts, or, in this case, a collection of moving images from a talented group of filmmakers. Each director only had to abide by a few rules, meaning audiences get to see Jane interpreted in eight different cinematic languages, her existence mediated by eight different minds.
“The Seven Faces of Jane” is set to premiere in select theaters and on VOD on January 13 via Gravitas Ventures.