Cannes’ best actor winner Caleb Landry Jones (“Nitram”), Emmy-nominated actor Peter Sarsgaard (“Memory”) and Oscar-nominated actor Andrea Riseborough (“To Leslie”) are set to star in Michael Almereyda’s (“Hamlet”), an adaptation of Don DeLillo’s New York Times best-selling novel “Zero K.” Rodrigo Teixeira’s leading Brazilian label RT Features (“I’m Still Here”) and Anthony Katagas’s Keep Your Head will produce, with shooting scheduled to begin early 2026 in São Paulo, Brazil.
“Zero K,” which marks the fourth collaboration between Teixeira and Katagas, follows a young man drawn into the designs of his tech-billionaire father, landing in a remote desert compound where the wealthy seek to extend human limits through cryonics and radical science. The woman who binds these two estranged men submits to the project with mixed emotions, as they all face challenges linking love, life and death.
UTA Independent Film Group will represent North American sales, with Heretic Films overseeing international sales. Andrea Riseborough serves as an executive producer. Almereyda reunites with Sarsgaard, his star in “Experimenter,” and cinematographer Sean Price Williams (“Good Time”), who shot his films “Marjorie Prime” and “Tesla.” Williams recently collaborated with Landry Jones in Athina Rachel Tsangari’s “Harvest.”
American director Almereyda has a career spanning over a quarter of a century, having worked with major names such as Ethan Hawke in the Sundance-winning “Marjorie Prime.” After 30 years, his cult vampire classic “Nadja,” executive produced by the late auteur David Lynch, will soon return to theaters with a 4K director’s cut after premiering at the Toronto International Film Festival.
“I feel lucky to have gathered such a distinctive and masterful cast, and to reunite with Peter and Sean,” said Almereyda. “DeLillo’s book captures a particular mix of realism and dream logic, wonderment and dread, and we’re eager to translate this into a movie.”
On top of “Zero K,” Teixeira’s RT Features continues on a busy schedule following an Oscar win for Walter Salles’s history-making “I’m Still Here” earlier in the year.
The label is currently getting ready to shoot Benjamín Naishtat’s “Glaxo,” in pre-production on “La Perra” by Dominga Sotomayor (“The Year of the Everlasting Storm”) and just wrapped production on James Gray’s “Paper Tiger,” starring two-time Oscar-nominee Scarlett Johansson and Miles Teller.
RT Features is also in post-production on Rami Kodeih’s “Wolves,” inspired by the real-life collapse of Lebanon’s banking system in 2019. The Brazilian company is also behind major indie hits such as Luca Guadagnino’s “Call Me By Your Name” and Noah Baumbach’s “Frances Ha.”
The acquisition of “Zero K’s” film rights was brokered by Bethany Haynes at Sloss Eckhouse Dasti Haynes LawCo LLP and Renée Frigo of Oak Street Pictures, with Amy Schiffman working on behalf of Don DeLillo.