It’s been about two years since The Grand Budapest Hotel came out and that’s becoming an issue. My patience for filmmakers taking their time is usually quite high – it comes with being a Terrence Malick fan and most years, there’s plenty of good and great movies to see to keep your attention off such matters. When it comes to directors like Wes Anderson, Martin Scorsese, David Fincher, Jia Zhang-ke, and P.T. Anderson, amongst a few other major names, however, there’s no helping a dedicated fan.

As such, the lack of information currently available about Anderson’s follow-up to what was, in my approximation, the best film of 2014, alongside the other Anderson’s Inherent Vice, has been a bit frustrating. Well, we do know that the movie is stop-motion animated, in a similar style as Anderson’s Fantastic Mr. Fox, and that the narrative will center on the lives of dogs, though exactly how we will get to know these dogs remains a bit of a mystery. During an interview with our very own Steven Weintraub, Jeff Goldblum confirmed that he will be voicing a role in the movie, alongside Bryan Cranston, Edward Norton, Bill Murray, and Bob Balaban, though it’s still unclear if they will be voicing canines or people. Still, as cast lists go, that’s pretty stellar and it’s unlikely this will all turn out to be a stars-on-autopilot situation like Last Vegas.

More important is the news that came in via a GQ interview that Anderson recently did, in which he essentially confirms that he has started production. Toward the end of the interview, he mentions that he has to get back to an animated movie he’s making and unless he’s talking about some very ambitious American Express commercial, we can assume he’s talking about his dog movie. Here’s exactly what he said via Playlist:

“I’ve got an animated movie I’m doing that’s happening across the room from me right now. So I can see a long list of e-mails from people on the set whom I now need to address,”

Knowing that he’s already in the game and working is a bit of a relief and gives us a bit of a timetable; the movie will likely not hit theaters until 2018 under that schedule, or possibly Christmas season 2017, if things are going well without any major hiccups. Still, that’s another year, at the very least, before we get to see the new Wes Anderson (with a new Alexandre Desplat score) and though I’m not one to look a gift horse in the face, it’s going to be a long 365 days.