**Wuthering Heights **director Andrea Arnold is already at work on her next film – American Honey – with cameras cranking in Oklahoma. So it’s a good thing that she’s found someone besides Shia LaBeouf to star in it, hiring Arielle Holmes.
The film, written by Arnold, follows a runaway teenager who starts selling magazine subscriptions to make money and falls in with a crowd that encourages love, hard-partying and law-breaking. It’s sort of an Almost Famous for the magazine subs crowd, with Arnold making several trips across to the States while researching the script, immersing herself in a real-life magazine sales team.
LaBeouf’s role remains shrouded in mystery, and Deadline’s story on the film mentions that Holmes isn’t the star, so we’re assuming Arnold has once again found a total newcomer for the main role, but she has yet to release any details.
Holmes could be a source of information for whoever does take that primary part, since she spent time living on the streets of New York as a 19 year-old, before she was discovered by filmmakers Joshua and Ben Safdie, who were doing research for a project. They encouraged her to tell her story, which will be published as a memoir and has already become a film starring Holmes and directed by the pair, called Heaven Knows What. The movie has just opened in the US after a successful run at festivals, but there’s no word on a UK release.