Perhaps putting his Shia LaBeouf-scripted Auschwitz film on hold––how you feel about that prospect is a fantastic Rorschach test––Abel Ferrara has a New Rose Hotel / Go Go Tales reunion in store. As his documentary Turn in the Wound debuts at the Berlinale, he’s well into development on American Nails, a gangster film that will star Willem Dafoe and Asia Argento and roll cameras this summer. [Variety]
Almost needless to say Ferrara wouldn’t, at this wild stage of his career, simply return to classic territory: as written by him and Rossella De Venuto, it retells Euripides’ Hippolytus “in a tale set in the gangster world of primal violence, power and revenge [that] pits Argento against the male-dominated remnants of power and entitlement, in the shadow of the Roman Empire in contemporary Italy.” Ferrara’s last time in Rome, Zeros and Ones, is among the wildest visions of the modern world any director’s forged this century. Refracted through the lens of Greek myth, it’s opportunity for something major.