French director Mia Hansen-Love is seeing more and more opportunities come to her. The filmmaker’s last film, the critically acclaimed “Things To Come,” starred Isabelle Huppert in a superb performance, and it’s opened even more doors for the respected filmmaker. While her next project will still be the hostage drama “Maya,” starring Romain Kolinka as a reporter who heads to India after being held hostage in Syria, she’s already looking ahead to its follow-up, the relationship drama, “Bergman Island.”
Screen Daily report that Greta Gerwig (who had a small role in Hansen-Love’s “Eden”), Mia Wasikowska and John Turturro have joined the cast. The film will be Hansen-Love’s English-language debut.
Last year before TIFF 2016, Hansen-Love revealed she’d just returned from the island of Faro, home of the legendary Ingmar Bergman. Inspired, while there she began writing the script for the film titled, “Bergman Island,” likely an homage or hat tip to Marie Nyreröd‘s documentary of the same name about the famous Swedish director and his self-imposed exile in the Faro islands. Said to tell the story of the relationship between a filmmaking couple, it was suggested the picture was inspired by her relationship with fellow French filmmaker Olivier Assayas, but that’s apparently not the case (though given they were likely vacationing there together, one has to assume something personal bled through). Screen Daily has further details on the script.
The picture revolves around an American filmmaking couple who retreat to the island for the summer to each write screenplays for their upcoming films in an act of pilgrimage to the place that inspired Bergman. As the summer and their screenplays advance, the lines between reality and fiction start to blur against the backdrop of the Island’s wild landscape.
There’s no word on who will play whom, but Turturro will obviously be the husband and it’s anyone’s guess which female will play the wife as Hansen-Love and Assayas have a big age difference in their relationship and one can’t just presume the older actress, Gerwig, will play that part (a similar big age gap also featured in Hansen-Love’s relationship drama, “Goodbye First Love”). Two Mia Hansen-Love films hopefully arriving in the next two years? That sounds pretty damn great to us.