EXCLUSIVE: Willem Dafoe and Greta Lee hit the Venice Film Festival this weekend in Kent Jones’ playful drama Late Fame, which world premieres in the Orizzonti sidebar.
Dafoe leads the cast with a quietly authentic performance as protagonist Ed Saxberger, a forgotten New York poet who works in the post office.
With his life on the poetry circuit a distant memory, Saxberger is suddenly propelled out of his humdrum life, when he is ‘redisovered’ by a group of young admirers wallowing in nostalgia for the lost downtown New York of the late 1970s and early 80s.
Past Lives star Greta Lee plays Gloria, an older woman who has also been adopted by the group as its designated “tragic heroine”.
Further cast include Edmund Donovan as the leader of the band of well-heeled faux bohemians; Jake Lacy and Luca Padovan as other members of the group; Tom Torn as Saxberger’s flamboyant neighbor and Clark Johnson as a friend unaware of his past life as a poet.
Deadline can reveal a first clip of of the film in which Gloria is first introduced to Saxberger, who is immediately hooked but will come to learn that her flamboyant appearance and devil-may-care front hides a darker side and reality.
Jones has directed the feature from a screenplay by Oscar-nominated screenwriter Samy Burch (May December), which in turn is an adaptation of late Austrian writer Arthur Schnitzler’s eponymous novel set in 1890s Vienna.
Late Fame is Jones’ second fiction feature after the 2019 work Diana, while his non-fiction works include Hitchcock/Truffaut (2015) and A Letter To Elia, co-directed with Martin Scorsese, with whom he also cowrote the latter’s documentary My Voyage To Italy (1999).
“The very first time I read Samy’s script, so emotionally varied and knotty, so funny and so bracingly frank, the film started forming in my mind,” says Jones.
“I could see the characters. I could see the places where they hung out and where they made a living. I could see the New York of now and the New York of a now vanished past, one delicately layered over the other. And I could feel the presence of poetry, forever fragile and at its very best forever free.”
Late Fame is a Killer Films Production in association with Fresh Fish Films, Working Barn Productions, Morning Moon Productions and mk2 Films, with the latter Paris-based company also handing international sales.
The post ‘Late Fame’ Clip: Watch Greta Lee As Mercurial Actress Who Beguiles Willem Dafoe’s Rediscovered Poet In Venice-Bound Drama appeared first on Deadline.
