Production
Development and casting
Peter Bogdanovich first began thinking about the idea for Wait for Me after the tragic murder of Dorothy Stratten, in around November of 1980, but he did not complete a first draft of a script until the end of that decade. [5] [3] "I like the story. It's got a lot more difficult since I first thought of it, though. It used to be about a guy who married three times and had three daughters. Now he marries six times and has six daughters," he later said of the various permutations the film went through over the years. [6] It was originally envisioned it as a vehicle for Stratten, telling a romantic story about an orchestra conductor who falls for a Dutch violinist. That early concept, called The Return of the Count, was planned as a deeply personal comedy with roots in his own life. [7]
Eventually, the idea evolved into what Bogdanovich called a "ghost comedy", that was influenced by his childhood love of René Clair's The Ghost Goes West (1935). [7] The character of Charles Benedict—modeled on figures like John Cassavetes and Bogdanovich himself—was initially intended to be played by Cassavetes before his death in 1989. "For the rest of the time before he died, he'd say, 'Are you going to make that picture?' I said, 'Yeah.' He said, 'You better make that picture.' And then when he was very close to dying, one of the last things he said to me was, 'Listen, kid, you better make that picture, because you know what? I'll be there'." [5] Over time, Bogdanovich worked on the script intermittently, reimagining it as a far more ambitious ensemble piece that would only work with "recognizable" star actors playing the characters. [7]
The closest iteration to the film being made was in the late 1990s, which had Michael Caine, Gena Rowlands, Anjelica Huston, Catherine Deneuve, Liza Minnelli, Isabella Rossellini, Cybill Shepard, George Segal, Harry Carey Jr., Alain Delon, Ben Gazzara, Peter Falk, Christopher Reeve, Jerry Lewis, [4] [8] [9] and Quentin Tarantino in the cast. He was able to raise $15 million in financing, but put it on hold because he didn't feel the script was "quite right", and vowed return to it once it had been rewritten sufficiently. [1] In 2004, Bogdanovich told author Peter Tonguette that he wanted the ghosts in the film to function visually in a way unseen before: "They sort of disappear and then appear, dematerialize and then materialize. But they're always transparent," he said, imagining scenes where spirits would drop in with only a line before vanishing again. [7]
Finally satisfied with a new draft, Bogdanovich came close to making it in the mid-2010s with the producing assistance of Brett Ratner and his company RatPac Entertainment. [10] [3] [11] In 2016, he allegedly had a famous actor considering the main part, but did not disclose who. "If we have him, then everybody else will fall into place," he said at the 18th Buenos Aires Independent Film Festival. [2] By 2018, the project remained on the future docket for Bogdanovich, with him revealing in an interview that Frank Marshall would now be producing it, and that they were still discussing actors. [12] [e] Wes Anderson and Noah Baumbach were also said to have offered to help co-produce the film. [14] Though it was never officially confirmed, it could be presumed that the "famous actor" Bogdanovich spoke of was none other than Breaking Bad star Bryan Cranston, whom he had been in continuous contact with over the COVID-19 pandemic about a cryptically-described "future part in a picture." [15] Regardless, Bogdanovich was still hoping to make the film at the time of his death in 2022. [16] [14] [17] [18]
Filming
The film was planned to be shot in various cities in different countries. The order in which they appear in the film are Rome, Rio, Vienna, Budapest, Vienna again, Salzburg, and Prague. [2] [8] Bogdanovich surmised the film would go into production in spring 2017. [2]