It’s been eight years since Todd Haynes and Cate Blanchett last worked together, for Carol, their second such collaboration. (After Blanchett served as one of several of Haynes’ various Bobs Dylan for 2007’s I’m Not There.) Now, the May December director has revealed that he’s attempting to lure Blanchett back into the fold, this time with an adaptation of Jean Ganet’s 1947 play The Maids.
This is per a recent conversation Haynes had with French publication Le Point (via The Playlist), saying that while he’s currently finishing up Pedro Pascal and Danny Ramirez’s De Noche—the movie that previously almost got blown up when Joaquin Phoenix bailed on it, before Pascal stepped in—he’s also got his eye on the next movie. “I’ll let you in on something: my next film—after the one I’m currently finishing, De Noche—will be an adaptation of The Maids,” Haynes said. “I have a very particular approach to the story; I obviously can’t say anything, but I’ve never seen this approach anywhere else… I think Cate Blanchett, who performed the play on stage with Isabelle Huppert, will be in my film.”
For those unfamiliar, The Maids—which Blanchett did indeed star with Huppert in, in a 2013 stage version in Australia that ended up traveling to New York—does sound like a real Todd Haynes/Cate Blanchett joint, centered on two maid sisters who take turns abusing and demeaning each other while pretending to be their haughty “Madame.” It’s easy to imagine both Haynes and Blanchett sinking their teeth into something like that, even if we have no idea yet what Haynes means when he says he has an “approach” to the material that nobody’s ever seen before. The upshot is that if your “Todd Haynes/Cate Blanchett psychosexual drama” meters were running low, Haynes might have a top-up for you going pretty soon.
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