UPDATED: Per Variety, production began last week and Helen Hunt has been added to the cast.
EARLIER: Peter Greenaway is about to shoot his next film, “Lucca Mortis,” which stars none other than Dustin Hoffman in the lead role.
Greenaway built a career out of his incredible, and visionary, 1989 masterpiece “The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover.” His other notable works include “The Draughtsman’s Contract,” “A Zed and Two Noughts” and “Drowning by Numbers.”
Filming on “Lucca Mortis” should start in the second week of November and last until mid-December. I wouldn’t be surprised if they try to submit this one for Cannes. The plot follows the life of an elderly man (Hoffman) and his past.
Hoffman is one of the greats, what else would you make of a filmography that includes “The Graduate”, “Midnight Cowboy”, “Little Big Man”, “Straw Dogs”, “Papillon”, “Lenny, All the Presidents Men”, “Marathon Man”, “Straight Time”, “Kramer v Krame, “Tootsie”, and “Rain Man”.
I haven’t really seen Hoffman on-screen since his excellent turn in 2017’s “The Meyerowitz Stories,” but that all soon will change as he’s already shot his part in Francis Ford Coppola’s “Megalopolis” (which is also being tipped for Cannes).
This mini Hoffman renaissance comes after the actor was embroiled in #MeToo accusations back in 2018. Writer Anna Graham Hunter wrote an op-ed for THR alleging that Hoffman had groped her and spoke inappropriately about sex when she was an intern on the 1985 TV movie “Death of a Salesman.”
Things got weirder when, a few weeks later, John Oliver was hosting a panel in relation to the 20th anniversary of "Wag the Dog” and be decided to bring up the accusations during the panel, grilling Hoffman on the topic. This clearly irked the actor, and for good reason. Oliver had no excuse bringing up the topic in that setting.