Schuyler Weiss

Source: TIFFCOM

Schuyler Weiss

Baz Luhrmann’s Joan of Arc feature is set to go into production next year with a story that resonates with contemporary themes, according to Australian producer Schuyler Weiss.

Delivering a masterclass seminar at Tokyo market TIFFCOM, Weiss said meetings were ongoing with US studio Warner Bros but expected to go into pre-production next year, filming by mid-2026.

Titled Jehanne d’Arc, it will star UK actress Isla Johnston in the title role and is based on 1974 novel Blood Red, Sister Rose by Schindler’s Ark author Thomas Keneally. The teenage Joan of Arc led France’s army to victory in 1429 and was burned at the stake in 1931.

“We will try and bring to the screen the true story of a 17-year-old girl who found herself in a fractured and devastated world, her country on its knees, and the future for young people completely uncertain,” said Wiess.

“The only thing she knew was that her fate was held tightly in the knobbly fingered grip of the entrenched powers of a bunch of old dudes. Her ability as a 17-year-old girl to break that world wide open and recapture the future for France at a time of change and peril, feels like a story that people might see something in today.”

It will mark Luhrmann’s first narrative feature since Elvis, which was nominated for eight Oscars. Weiss, who was a producer on the film, said of the upcoming film: “We take up our sword once again and go back out there to try and deliver epic, original storytelling through this complicated, messy, collaborative medium of filmmaking to the widest possible audiences.”

The producer, who first worked with Luhrmann on 2008’s Australia, also reflected on how the filmmaker has embraced the use of artificial intelligence (AI) as a tool to bring his vision to the screen.

“We had some interesting experiences with AI when it wasn’t even really called that,” said Weiss, recalling how the technology was used to insert star Austin Butler into old Elvis films for scenes in the 2022 feature. This was despite how much “Baz would have jumped at the chance to reshoot Viva Las Vegas”.

“The major VFX companies were not our partners on that,” he said. “We actually partnered with one of the technology labs the University of Adelaide in South Australia, who were they were doing those kinds of machine learning experiments. Boy, what a difference a few years makes.

“Now we use AI as a creative tool in terms of imagining things. We’ve never been in the position to put AI into the finished product of a film, and I’m not sure that we ever will, but it’s a very exciting creative tool.

“The reason why someone like Bas is such a big proponent of AI is because he knows the difference between creative and generative, and AI is just a derivative tool that can collage a seemingly infinite - but actually finite - bunch of stuff. That’s not creativity.”

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