Louis C.K. Preps First Directed Film in 16 Years
Louis C.K.‘s new movie, I Love You, Daddy, will premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival, the Los Angeles Times reports. The film marks the first feature-length movie C.K. has directed since 2001’s Pootie Tang.
C.K. stars in I Love You, Daddy as Glen Topher, “a successful television producer and writer” raising a daughter, China, played by Chloë Grace Moretz. The cast also includes John Malkovich, Edie Falco, Pamela Adlon and Charlie Day.
I Love You, Daddy was shot in New York on 35 mm black-and-white film and was made with little outside attention. It’s unclear what the film’s distribution status will be following its premiere at TIFF.
Over the past several years, C.K. has directed numerous projects, including his own stand-up specials, web videos and episodes of his TV shows, Louie and Horace and Pete, as well as Adlon’s Better Things. But his film output behind the camera has been limited to a single short (Searching for Nixon) since Pootie Tang. The Chris Rock-starring blaxploitation spoof has slowly become a cult classic, but upon its release, it flopped and C.K. has claimed that the studio essentially removed him from the picture during post-production.
In a 2011 interview with Rolling Stone, C.K. said he’d only direct another feature if he was given complete autonomy: “It’s not that I control a bunch of people,” he said of how he likes to work. “It’s just that nobody controls me.”
While his work has a film director has been limited, C.K. has taken more supporting movie roles over the past few years, including turns in Trumbo, American Hustle and Blue Jasmine. C.K. is reportedly also working on a new animated TV series, tentatively titled The Cops, which he co-created and will star in with Albert Brooks. The series received a 10-episode order and is expected to premiere on TBS in 2018.