Academy Award-winning A Beautiful Mind scribe Akiva Goldsman‘s directing debut is an adaptation of Mark Helprin’s 1983 magical-realism novel Winter’s Tale.
Sreenwriter-turned-director already has Colin Farrell set as the lead in his next project with Russell Crowe and Will Smith taking supporting roles, and now Matt Bomer (Magic Mike), Lucy Griffiths (True Blood) and legendary actress Eva Marie Saint (North By Northwest) have joined the cast including William Hurt, Jessica Brown Findlay.
Hans Zimmer will perform scoring duties on the film which production is set to begin in New York on October 27th, 2012.
Farrell is portraying a thief who breaks into a Manhattan apartment and falls in love with a dying girl who lives there and will be played by Findlay; Bomer is playing Farrell’s father, while Griffiths will play his mother because the story takes place in modern day, but also spans back into the 19th century – flashbacks seem the only way to pull this one off if they want to avoid cheesy makeup effects.
Fingers crossed for something unique.
Here’s the book summary:
New York City is subsumed in arctic winds, dark nights, and white lights, its life unfolds, for it is an extraordinary hive of the imagination, the greatest house ever built, and nothing exists that can check its vitality. One night in winter, Peter Lake–orphan and master-mechanic, attempts to rob a fortress-like mansion on the Upper West Side.
Though he thinks the house is empty, the daughter of the house is home. Thus begins the love between Peter Lake, a middle-aged Irish burglar, and Beverly Penn, a young girl, who is dying.
Peter Lake, a simple, uneducated man, because of a love that, at first he does not fully understand, is driven to stop time and bring back the dead. His great struggle, in a city ever alight with its own energy and beseiged by unprecedented winters, is one of the most beautiful and extraordinary stories of American literature.
