Local Filmmaker Alex Ross Perry’s Queen Of Earth Opens August 26
Park Slope resident Alex Ross Perry has quite a one-two punch of film projects at the moment.
His newest film, Queen of Earth, will be opening this Wednesday, August 26. Mad Men‘s Elisabeth Moss stars as Catherine, a woman who is dealing with the loss of her father. As she heads to a lake house for a retreat and an attempted recovery from his loss, her life takes a turn for the worse. Katherine Waterston plays her best friend, Ginny, however their relationship becomes the crux of the film’s ensuing madness.
Care to guess what Perry’s next film project is? A live-action version of Winnie the Pooh.
Perry has been a Christopher Robin fan since he was a kid. In a recent Vanity Fair article, he describes his take on the Winnie the Pooh story: “Winnie the Pooh is not about animals, it’s about stuffed animals. A common problem for Pooh Bear is that he splits his seam, not that he bleeds. It’s not Doctor Doolittle.”
Though he’s been busy directing his own films, he has a history of keeping up with local stories as well. When the video store Reel Life South closed in 2012, Ross wrote an in-depth interview with owner Joe Martin (who now tends bar at the Kensington space Hamilton’s). Ross lamented the closing, learning of the news when he stopped by the story to “inform the owner Joe Martin that The Color Wheel [an earlier Ross film] will soon be released on DVD, and that I was looking forward to the honor of seeing it on his shelf.”
So while Queen of Earth was heralded by some at the Berlin Film Festival earlier this year, Perry is still keeping an eye on his home borough — so much so that in Ross’ 2014 film, Listen Up Phillip, Jason Swartzmann plays a Brooklyn novelist.
“I live a dignified life in Park Slope, and I wanted to make a New York movie that’s brownstones and nice tree-lined streets, because that’s my life,” he told the Times last year in an interview about that film.
As Ross continues to achieve critical and international success, his feet still seem firmly planted in the neighborhood (in his cool apartment).
Queen of Earth opens Wednesday, August 26.
