Some additional details on Paul Thomas Anderson's next film can be found via Daniel Richtman’s Patreon page.
I would like to believe that what Richtman has here is accurate information. In the past, he’s been more right than wrong with his intel. The details given surely hint at PTA adapting Thomas Pynchon’s “Vineland,” which has been the hot rumor for months now.
It will be about a young girl of Mixed Ethnicity, Junior High/Freshman Student who is physically athletic and excels at Martial Arts. Leonardo DiCaprio is attached to play her mentor.
Regina Hall is attached to play DL CHASTAIN, a martial arts expert and ninja. She is the daughter of a military family that moves around the world. While in Japan, she is approached by a martial arts instructor who teaches her the secret ways of the ninja, including how to kill with a touch that takes a year to work.She is recruited by mobster Ralph Wayvone to assassinate Brock Vond while posing as a prostitute, but accidentally gives the death touch to Takeshi Fumimota, who has been sent in Vond's place after the plot was discovered.
Back in late November, PTA’s producer and casting director, Cassandra Kulukundis, posted a casting call that was looking for a “teenage girl who excels at Martial Arts”.
PTA has mentioned the novel, “Vineland,” numerous times over the years, and in a 2014 Time Out interview he even insinuated that he tried to script it: “I'd wanted to adapt “Vineland”, but I never had the courage. It seemed to be a great way to translate [Pynchon] into a movie.
He’s called the novel “borderline pathological” in another interview with IndieWire. Here’s PTA elaborating on his unadorned love for Pynchon:
“I am the type of person who hears there’s a new Pynchon book, and I will go to the Internet five times a minute to see what new information there is. I am that pathological about it. So, when I heard there was a new book, I was just waiting and waiting for it to come out.”
Pynchon’s “Inherent Vice” was already turned by PTA into a polarizing 2014 film. He’s been citing the author’s many novels since the ‘90s. There was no reason to brush off the theory that he’d want to adapt Pynchon again and, if Richtman is correct, then another one is coming very soon.
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