Frank Ocean Begins Filming His Directorial Debut

Frank Ocean fans have been waiting a long time for new music—his last albums, Endless and Blonde, came out after a four-year gap following Channel Orange. Now, it’s been more than twice that long, but instead of a new album, Ocean has taken on a different creative challenge: directing his first movie.

According to Variety, David Jonsson (Alien: Romulus, Rye Lane) has landed the lead role in Ocean’s directorial debut, which he also wrote and is currently filming in Mexico City. While details about the plot are still unknown, research shows the working title is Philly, and filming actually began in mid-December. Ocean was even spotted in Mexico City last summer shooting footage. Earlier rumors linked A24 and Taylor Russell to the project, but that hasn’t been confirmed.

This isn’t Ocean’s first experience with filmmaking. Back in 2017, cinematographer Sam Levy shared, “I was hired by Spike Jonze to go on tour with him and Frank and do the live show video. So, Spike and I both operated on stage with Frank. We each had four different cameras. One was an ALEXA. One was an Ikonoskop, this Swedish camera that is no longer made. One was a MiniDV camera which Spike used to shoot his skate videos with and I used to shoot experimental art films with. And then one was an infrared camera. For each song, we would each have different cameras that get fed to this master board that get transmitted to the stadium IMAG screens. There was this brilliant guy mixing everything together. So that already happened, like the tour happened, the live video happened. Then I think Frank and Spike are using all the footage to make something else. Honestly, I don’t really know much about what they are doing. They are going to do something with it. I’m waiting to find out myself.”

That project never surfaced, but Ocean has long shown an interest in film. When Blonde was released, he shared a list of his favorite directors, including Andrei Tarkovsky, David Lynch, Ingmar Bergman, Stanley Kubrick, Martin Scorsese, Orson Welles, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Jean Cocteau, Alfred Hitchcock, Francis Ford Coppola, Fritz Lang, Werner Herzog, Akira Kurosawa, Ridley Scott, Bernardo Bertolucci, Sergei Eisenstein, F. W. Murnau, and Luis Buñuel.