Chilean filmmaker Pablo Larrain (“Jackie”) was supposed to be shooting the Stephen King adaptation “Lisey’s Story” for Apple TV+ before the coronavirus lockdown happened and put a stop to those plans.
Julianne Moore stars in the project as 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.
IndieWire reports that during a Cannes market conversation with MUBI founder Efe Cakarel, Larrain opened up about the interruption saying much of the project was shot but had to be stopped several weeks out from finishing. Even now he’s not sure how things will restart at this point:
“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.”
He’s even more concerned with how the delay in production and the various restrictions in cinemas mean for indie movies as a whole:
“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? 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.”
Larrain recently sold his Princess Diana biopic “Spencer” starring Kristen Stewart to Neon. Production on that isn’t expected to start for a while. LarraÃn is also producing Claudia Llosa’s Netflix film “Fever Dream,” and contributed a short to Netflix’s “Homemade” short film anthology releasing this week:
