Although it was looking like Lars von Trier may follow the path of many an auteur nowadays and head to television for his next project, instead his English-language drama The House That Jack Built will take the form of an ambitious, decade-spanning feature. Thanks to a new interview from Cannes, we now have more details on the serial killer drama, which is gearing up for a production that will be just under $10 million.
“It will take a long time because Lars will work in two different shooting periods, he wants to be able to change the script in between. He wants to follow the thing he started in Nymphomaniac with digressions,” producer Louise Vesth tells Screen Daily. “It’s a film about Jack, a serial killer. We follow him over 10 years and we experience the way he gets into the killings. We follow his murders where he’s taking more and more chances because he wants to make the perfect piece of art… the ending will be fatal.”
She continues, telling Variety, “It will be a serial killer movie like you’ve never seen before. He wants to be able to change it between periods of shooting because when we’ll have done the body of the film in the fall, he will then go edit it and he sees how he can combine the murders.” Revealing it’ll be set in Washington, but shot in France, Germany, Sweden, and Denmark, she adds, “like with Dancer In The Dark he wants to find a location in the Film Vast area [of Western Sweden] for this purpose.”
With casting currently underway for a mix of American and European actors, alongside Jack there will be another major male character, and four big parts for females. Split into “five incidents” aka the murders and then the “digressions” in between, we imagine this will dive deeper into darker territory than his last feature, but still have the comedic underpinnings he’s known for.
Production on The House That Jack Built will begin this August and a premiere is planned for 2018.