Danish maverick Lars von Trier might be in the middle of editing his Dogville follow-up, Manderlay, but he has promised producer and Zentropa co-founder Peter Aalbaek Jensen that he will make a more commercial film before turning to the final instalment in the USA trilogy, Wasington.
While a finished script has yet to be delivered, Aalbaek Jensen assures that it will be commercial enough to satisfy both Zentropa as well as the distributors who have taken chances with Trier's controversial films in the past.
The project's working title is Antichrist, an English-language horror film to be set in the US, and be "set in nature and based on the theory that it was Satan, not God, who created the world," as Jensen puts it.
Although Jensen would not be drawn on details of the budget, it is likely that filming won't start until 2006. As usual, it is expected that Trier will opt for European locations which look similar to the US.
Trier previously tackled horror (and black comedy) in the hit TV-series The Kingdom, which was his big commercial breakthrough in Denmark.
Trier, who also wrote the script for Thomas Vinterberg's highly anticipated Dear Wendy, earlier this year wrote a comedy with the working title Erik Nietzsche: The Early Years - although the fate of that project has yet to be decided.
Manderlay takes place two months after the events in Dogville, and sees Grace (now played by Bryce Dalles Howard) comes across an Alabama plantation, where the workers are unaware that slavery was abolished 70 years ago. Her attempts to turn the plantation into a collective ends in chaos.
When Trier received the Konrad Wolf Prize (Euros 5.000), in memory of the East German filmmaker this week in Copenhagen, he told local press: "I expect that my film will unite the Ku Klux Klan and the coloured, because both parties will want to kill me afterwards."
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