Milk director Gus Van Sant is just starting to shoot his new movie (which was formerly called Restless, but is now now apparently untitled), and as a result plenty more casting news has emerged. The film, produced by Bryce Dallas Howard and based on a script by her college friend, Jason Lew, is about teenage boy and girl, who share a preoccupation with mortality.
A couple of weeks ago it was announced that Mia Masikowska, whose star is about the shoot into the stratosphere thanks to her lead role in Tim Burton’s Alice In Wonderland, will play the main girl. However Van Sant seems to be filling out the rest of the cast with relatively little known but rather interesting names.
THR reports that the lead male role has gone to Henry Hopper, the 19-year-old son of Dennis Hopper. It’s certainly good news for him, as he nearly got his big-break a couple of years ago in Wes Craven’s upcoming My Soul To Take, but got bumped when he came down with glandular fever. Restless will be his first starring role (and his first film roleof any sort since he was six). He’ll play a boy trying to get over the death of his parents.
Van Sant must have been trawling through the kids of the rich and famous, as he’s also cast Schuyler Fisk, the daughter of Sissy Spacek, in the movie. She’ll play Masikowska’s sister.
Those without famous parents joining the movie include Chin Han (2012) as the doctor treating Masikowska, Ryo Kase (Letter From Iwo Jima) as the spirit of a World War II kamikaze pilot who regularly visits the boy (the plot is being kept under wraps, so it’s difficult to say how this will fit in) and Jane Adams (Eternal Sunshine, Hung) as Hopper’s aunt.
The film has just started filming, with a release planned for late next year.