David Cro­nen­berg is gear­ing up for his first new film in near­ly a decade

A lit­tle more than a year ago, I had the good for­tune to inter­view the Cana­di­an mas­ter film­mak­er David Cro­nen­berg, then mak­ing the rounds in sup­port of Dis­ap­pear­ance at Clifton Hill, a lit­tle hor­ror indie in which he plays a sup­port­ing role onscreen. One of the top­ics of dis­cus­sion was the pos­si­bil­i­ty of anoth­er direc­to­r­i­al effort from the esteemed auteur, then six years out from his last release, 2014’s Maps to the Stars.

He detailed dif­fi­cul­ties in find­ing financ­ing and a green light, mak­ing men­tion of a pro­posed minis­eries, an adap­ta­tion of his own nov­el, and a ​“very per­son­al” script. Today, it looks like those frus­tra­tions have come to an end, with the long-await­ed news that a new film de Cro­nen­berg is on the horizon.

Screen Dai­ly has relayed a report from their sis­ter pub­li­ca­tion KFTV that shoot­ing is set to com­mence in ear­ly August on Crimes of the Future, described as ​“a strange film noir sto­ry” by Vig­go Mortensen, a reg­u­lar Cro­nen­berg col­lab­o­ra­tor already tapped to star in the film. The shoot will take place in Greece, and the bul­letin spec­i­fies that it’s planned to wrap up by mid-September.

Cro­nen-heads may recall that Crimes of the Future also hap­pens to be the title of his sec­ond film, made back in 1970 and set in the then-dis­tant future of 1997, an era thrown into dystopia by the inad­ver­tent exter­mi­na­tion of all sex­u­al­ly mature women. It’s there that an insane der­ma­tol­o­gist goes search­ing for his men­tor through a soci­ety of deprav­i­ty, in which lit­tle girls can be drugged into puber­ty for forcible impregnation.

The ques­tion is now whether this new film will remake that one direct­ly, or mere­ly use it as a spring­board for a new­ly reimag­ined sto­ry, but in either case, it seems like it’s prob­a­bly the per­son­al script he referred to last year. Those curi­ous about the con­nec­tion may feel free to check out the com­plete 63-minute orig­i­nal below, a clear demon­stra­tion of Cronenberg’s extra­or­di­nary con­fi­dence in his then-nascent career, with his pet themes and anx­i­eties all in place: