Casting News

Alice in Changes; Rachel Weisz & Michael Shannon Takes Seats at Joshua Marston’s Table Drama

Published on November 5, 2014

A Joshua Marston film sans subtitles? After film fest favorites Maria Full Of Grace (2004 Sundance hit) and The Forgiveness Of Blood (read our Criterion review), Marston (who in the past decade was attached to direct The Fortress of Solitude, The Iraqi Convoy Project and an untitled supernatural thriller) Screen Daily reports that the filmmaker will have a dream pairing at his disposal in Michael Shannon and Rachel Weisz, who is set to have a Jessica Chastain type year (having worked with prominent auteur filmmakers in 2014 in Lanthimos, Cianfrance and Sorrentino means an embarrassing set of riches for cinephiles in 2015). The untitled project is shooting in early 2015, with indie stalwarts Parts & Labor’s Lars Knudsen and Jay Van Hoy (they’ve also got Andrea Arnold’s American Honey on tap) producing alongside (our ’14 Sundance Trading Card profiled producer) Lucas Joaquin (Ira Sach’s Love is Strange) and Protagonist’s Eddie Vaisman (Lake Bell’s pistol whip smart In a World… ). Filming will take place in New York City.

Gist: Weisz will play Alice, the intriguing guest introduced at a dinner party hosted by Tom (Shannon) and his wife, celebrating his birthday.Tom increasingly believes he knows Alice but by a different name and a different biography, and suspects that she’s not there entirely by coincidence. The evening spins into a highly-charged reunion between a man in need of making a change in his life and a woman who desperately wants to stop changing.

Worth Noting: Marston was one of the filmmakers who participated on New York, I Love You.

Do We Care?: We’re into emotional warfare and one-upmanship at the dinner table (seek out Mona Fastvold’s The Sleepwalker) and we can imagine just how much weight such a sequence can carry when you consider the discovery of someone retrofitting their identity. We’re expecting a high value original screenplay with Marston’s pedigree.

Related Topics:Joshua Marston, Michael Shannon, Rachel Weisz, U.S. Indie Film News

Eric Lavallée

Eric Lavallée is the founder, CEO, editor-in-chief, film journalist and critic at IONCINEMA.com (founded in 2000). Eric is a regular at Sundance, Cannes and TIFF. He has a BFA in Film Studies at the Mel Hoppenheim School of Cinema. In 2013 he served as a Narrative Competition Jury Member at the SXSW Film Festival. He was an associate producer on Mark Jackson's This Teacher (2018 LA Film Festival, 2018 BFI London). In 2022 he served as a New Flesh Comp for Best First Feature at the 2022 Fantasia Intl. Film Festival. Current top films for 2022 include Tár (Todd Field), All That Breathes (Shaunak Sen), Aftersun (Charlotte Wells).