Haneke Dot Com

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Now that The White Ribbon has been seen by everyone - y'all have seen it, correct? Don't make me get all stern schoolmarm on your ass about it. Haneke brings it out in me, after all - we must naturally turn our attentions to what the man will be doing next. So far we've had a couple bits of info. First up, there was the news that he shared at the Q&A I saw him in back in October where he told us that he wanted to reunite with Isabelle Huppert for his next project, which brought me much glee, as The Piano Teacher is like oxygen to me. And then there was this exchange in an interview with him at the start of December:

Movieline: I read your next project is something about the Internet.

Haneke: That’s the one after the next one. The next project is a film about very old age people, and the humiliation from outside society when your body begins to fall apart. Our future.

Well it appears that Movieline has been proven correct after all, as he's now abandoned his film about old people because of somebody else's similar project. Via here:

"Oscar-nominated Austrian director Michael Haneke has abandoned his planned film about “humiliation and the physical deterioration of the aged” after seeing a Canadian project on a similar subject.

The project was tentatively called Ces Deux and Jean-Louis Trintignant and Isabelle Huppert were set to star. It was due to shoot in France this summer.

Haneke is now pressing ahead with a different screenplay although few details are known about the project. Les Films Du Losange, which will sell the new film, said the project is “about the internet” and will shoot around the world, in locations ranging from Japan to the US.

The untitled project is currently being scripted and the screenplay should be delivered by September."

Ces Deux translates to These Two. The sadness here is two-fold - I hope there's a place for Huppert in this new film, but it sounds much broader a concept than the film she was attached to, which was probably more character-based, and I imagine she'd sign on for that sort of work faster than one of his wide-ranging "Media is evil!" tales. But we have so few details, so who knows. And it's sad that he presumably won't get to work with Jean-Louis Trintignant either! The Conformist is one of my all-time favorite films. Oh well, maybe he'll find a way to cram them into this new project.

But secondly, this means just more time without a new Haneke film. And a big ol' BOO to that noise right there.
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