'No More Happy Endings!': Lars von Trier Announces Sci-Fi Project

After hinting at pursuing another genre exercise during his recent live-ish appearance at the New York Film Festival, filmmaker Lars von Trier today officially announced that he will follow Antichrist with the sci-fi offering Planet Melancholia. Details are typically sketchier-than-sketchy about von Trier's plot, though he offered this helpful clue: "No more happy endings!" Which, of course, is such a relief coming off the upbeat bloodbath that concludes his recent masterpiece.

Von Trier's producer was only marginally more helpful in outlining the project, announcing only that Melancholia would shoot next spring in Sweden and Germany and that it would impose Dogme 95-style handheld aesthetics on sumptuous science-fiction visuals -- sort of like Antichrist, but with a few extra moons where the child plunging to its death might go. Yet the best part of the story may be the reporter's invocation of Roland Emmerich as a possible genre inspiration; if ever there was a scene that demanded von Trier's interpretation, it would almost certainly be the devastation of Randy's Donuts.

· Lars von Trier goes from gore to Sci-Fi [THR]