Shane Carruth’s last film — Upstream Color, the rapturous coalescence of mystical roundworms, infected pigs, Thoreau, and some of the most beautiful cinematography in recent memory — starred the director himself, as well as a cast of lesser known actors (though Amy Seimetz would go on to be on The Killing). Clearly, the widespread interest and mystery of that film spread (like parasitic roundworms?) throughout Hollywood. For it’s just been announced that Carruth’s next film, The Modern Ocean, will have a pretty endless all-star cast.
Deadline reports that Anne Hathaway, Daniel Radcliffe, Abraham Attah (the young star of Beasts of No Nation), Keanu Reeves, Asa Buttefield, Jeff Goldblum, Chloë Grace Moretz and future Spider-Man Tom Holland have all signed on to the project; Carruth will also star. They describe the film as centering around “the competition for valuable shipping routes, the search for the hidden cache of priceless material and the powerful need for vengeance,” all of which lead to battles between massive ships. Speaking with the director back in August, Motherboard referred to it as a “nautical psychodrama.” When they asked where the story would take us, he’d mentioned everywhere from New York to Mumbai to Western Africa to Greece to Israel, noting that he’d chosen the ocean as his next setting because “the ocean is a place where [he] can set a story on a world stage. The notion is not policed in any kind of perfect way…and it tests everything. It tests everyone’s loyalty…”
There’s no news yet as to when we’ll be seeing Hathaway, Radcliffe, Attah, Reeves, etc. put to that test, but as a refresher of just how crazy this project could potentially be, here’s the Upstream Color trailer: