Alejandro González Iñárritu won back-to-back Best Director Oscars for 2014’s “Birdman” and 2015’s “The Revenant,” ever since then he’s been laying low, shooting the VR film '“Carne y Arena,” but no new feature-length films. Well, it does look as though, after a five-year absence, Iñárritu is planning on making a comeback with a new feature-length film.
El Universal [via The Film Stage] is reporting that the director is currently scouting locations and doing camera tests in Mexico City for a new project. Cinematographer Bradford Young (Arrival, A Most Violent Year) has been seen with Inarritu at these locations. While no specific details on the title, cast or plot are known yet, the Mexican outlet is reporting that the cast was “dressed in ‘90s clothes” and that Iñárritu and Young were seen at Chapultepec Castle and in the historic center of Mexico City.
Production on the film was set to kick off in April, but, clearly, that will not happen as most countries, including Mexico, are in the middle of dealing with the coronavirus pandemic. It does look, at least from these first few hints, that Inarritu may be taking a page out of fellow countryman Alfonso Cuaron’s notebook, making his own Mexico City-set story built around the director’s formative years.
The theatrical version runs 108 minutes, so we're talking a nearly 2-hour-10-minute cut of a movie that works because it's lean, and I'm not sure anyone needs that.