It’s taken a while, but The Maid of Orleans finally seems to be getting off the ground. The film, starring Elle Fanning and Christopher Abbott, was first announced in 2023 and was originally expected to start filming in early 2024. That never happened. Now, Nexus Point News has learned that filming is scheduled for October.
It’s not entirely clear whether production has already begun, though that appears likely. But we can confirm that a major scene involving a large number of soldiers will be filmed in Paris in October. Several dance sequences are also scheduled to shoot that same month.
A Movie Within a Movie
Fittingly enough, The Maid of Orleans is set in the film industry itself. Fanning plays Rebecca Spielman, a young woman fresh out of film school who moves to Paris and gets a job as the assistant to Sammy Lindberg, a promising but troubled director played by Abbott. Sammy is working on a film about Joan of Arc. As the production grows bigger and more ambitious, Rebecca’s dream job slowly begins to show its cracks. Her boss becomes increasingly demanding, while Rebecca finds herself pulled into a complicated web of power, desire and loyalty.
Nadia Tereszkiewicz was cast as Celine when the project was originally announced. Celine is the actress playing Joan of Arc in Sammy’s film. So, yes, it’s a movie about making a Joan of Arc movie, with apparently just as much drama happening behind the camera as in front of it.
Power and Sexuality
Writer-director Sarah Elizabeth Mintz loosely based the story on her own experiences in the film industry. With The Maid of Orleans, she wants to explore the complicated gray areas surrounding power and sexuality rather than presenting those dynamics as simply right or wrong. “Gendered power dynamics in the industry have been discussed largely through a binary lens,” Mintz previously told Variety. Her own experience, she said, was much more complicated: “complex, profoundly nuanced, and often uncomfortably situated in a moral gray area.”
That uncomfortable territory appears to be exactly where The Maid of Orleans wants to go, as Rebecca tries to navigate the increasingly blurry lines between ambition, desire, loyalty and power.
Finally, Some Concrete Dates
When The Maid of Orleans was announced in 2023, the plan was to shoot the film in France in early 2024. Then things went quiet. Very quiet. Now, there are finally some actual dates on the calendar. Rehearsals are scheduled for early October, with filming set to begin on October 5. After more than three years of waiting, The Maid of Orleans finally looks ready to roll cameras.
