Lucrecia Martel doesn't move fast, but she's moving. The Argentine filmmaker confirmed in an interview last week with El Pais (via Caligari) that the script for her next feature, "Gente," is complete, and that it's a science-fiction film.
Don't expect "Blade Runner," though. This is Lucrecia Martel after all. She said "Gente" is not a dystopian film and won't follow a classical narrative structure, which, if you've seen any of her work, should come as no surprise. She also joked that it would be a mainstream smash. Sure, Lucrecia.
There's no shoot date, no cast and no plot details yet. But the title isn't new. The only English-language mention of "Gente" I could find dates back to a 2009 interview, when Martel described it as a “horror script.” So this is a project that has been sitting in her drawer for well over a decade and has apparently mutated genres along the way. Very on brand.
Remember Martel's brief brush with actual mainstream filmmaking? Back in 2018, she revealed that Marvel had approached her to direct "Black Widow," telling her they wanted a female director to develop Scarlett Johansson's character, and that she shouldn't worry about the action scenes because the studio “would handle those.” She obviously declined the offee, and later didn’t hide her feelings on the MCU, calling your average Marvel movie "painful to the ears."
That said, sci-fi isn't foreign territory for her, either. Around that same period, Martel spent years developing an adaptation of "El Eternauta," the Argentine sci-fi comic, before walking away from it. She eventually resurfaced with "Zama" in 2017, a period film that took nearly a decade to release and that many high-brows consider one of the best films of the last decade. Her documentary "Our Land" followed last year.
Martel has only made a handful of features in 25 years ("La Ciénaga," "The Holy Girl," "The Headless Woman," "Zama"), and every one of them has been an event for festival audiences. A Martel sci-fi film that refuses both dystopia and conventional storytelling is an intriguing prospect.
The question, as always with her, is when. Given her track record, I wouldn't bet on seeing "Gente" before 2028, and given her history, a finished script is mostly just a small step forward.
You don't see this every day: a major filmmaker, mid-release, admitting he's just not very good at his job. That’s exactly what Aaron Sorkin has done as “The Social Reckoning” dies a slow death in theaters.