If you’re a fan of Lynn Shelton’s film work, you may have been wondering what the filmmaker has been up to in recent years. Other than last year’s “Outside In,” Shelton hadn’t directed a film of her own since 2014’s “Laggies.” However, in the interim, the filmmaker has been killing it on the TV side, directing dozens of episodes of some of the best TV around.
READ MORE: Lynn Shelton and Jay Duplass Charm With ‘Outside In’ [TIFF Review]
Shelton has collected directing credits for series such as “Shameless,” “Master of None,” “New Girl,” “The Good Place,” “Casual,” “Love,” and “GLOW.” And it appears that for Shelton’s next feature film, she’s going to bring some of those actors from her TV work along with her. In a recent post on Instagram, the director confirmed the cast for her next film, seemingly titled “Sword of Trust,” and it features Marc Maron, Michaela Watkins, Jillian Bell, Toby Huss (from “Halt And Catch Fire“), Jon Bass, Whitmer Thomas, Dan Bakkedahl and Tim Paul among others.
This isn’t the first we’ve heard of “Sword of Trust.” During press for “Outside In,” we had a chance to sit with Lynn Shelton and ask her to explain what she’s working on for her next film. She admittedly couldn’t say much, but did open up quite a bit:
“It took a few years to get the desire or this burning love but I am really excited to go back into a fully improvised dialogue movie. So, I am letting myself really go into some wacky directions, fun weird directions with the narrative, but it is still going to be grounded with very real feeling characters. But I have been sort of collecting because I learned that not every actor can improvise, far from it. So, I have been collecting the best of this amazing assembled cast that are all going to kill it and I just can’t wait. I am so excited!”
“I am just realizing that one two three of the people that have been cast are all people that I’ve worked with in television on this next movie,” she continued. Shelton has previously worked with Maron quite a bit. She directed one of his comedy specials, as well as episodes of “Maron” and the aforementioned “GLOW.” Watkins is also a Shelton alum, having appeared in “Casual.”
Obviously, if you’re a fan of Shelton’s work, you know that improvised dialogue is nothing new to the filmmaker. Her best-known film, “Humpday,” is a perfect example of her style. She explains that the new film shares the basic filmmaking structure of that project:
“Oh, yeah, it’s like ‘Humpday.’ ‘Humpday’ was like a 10 to 12-page elaborate description of what had to happen emotionally in each scene. So instead of rehearsing we get together, before we shoot a scene and we’re like, ‘Ok, this is what’s gonna happen, we’re gonna have to have this amount of exposition to deal with,’ but mostly it’s about the dynamic shifting from this place to another place and, the kind of A,B,C, D and then they have to kind of pass the soccer ball to each other down the field through the beats of a scene.”
There’s no word on a release date for “Sword of Trust,” but with Shelton (who co-wrote “Sword of Trust” with Mike O’Brien, creator of NBC‘s “A.P. Bio“) going back to her improvisational roots and the quality of the cast assembled, it looks like this project is one to keep an eye out for in the future.
https://www.instagram.com/p/BjWSVMNAqWX/
Yep, s'all true. (Fails to mention, however, that the brilliant @MikeOBrienXOXO co-wrote the script w me, & that the lovely @tobyhuss #danbakkedahl @WhitmerThomas & @porpoiseswallow co-star 😉 https://t.co/rA9kU0xlMe #SwordOfTrust @marcmaron @michaelaWat @jillianbell @thejonbass
— Lynn Shelton (@lynnsheltonfilm) June 2, 2018