After David Cronenberg transferred the words of Don DeLillo to the big screen with last year’s confounding, fascinating Cosmopolis, he’s set to work again with the author on a different adaptation, but this time handing the directing reigns over to another talent. Coming out of Madrid, Variety reports on the project, which sees quite a strong group of creative forces coming together.
He rarely does so, but Cronenberg will be stepping in front of the camera for an adaptation of DeLillo’s 2001 novel The Body Artist. Set to be directed by Luca Guadagnino, who delivered the sumptuous, ravishing I Am Love, the film will use the shortened title of Body Art, with a cast that also includes Isabelle Huppert (last seen in Amour), and Denis Lavant, who gave a twisty performance in Leos Carax‘s Holy Motors.
It’s difficult to imagine a finer ensemble for such a project, and we’ve been looking forward to see the next work from Guadagnino. While the roles of Cronenberg and Lavant aren’t confirmed, Huppert will be playing a woman who grieves after her husband’s death and finds a stranger living in the room above her. Check out the synopsis of the novel below thanks to Good Reads, for the film that set to begin shooting this summer.
In whatever form Don DeLillo chooses to write, there is simply no other American author who has so consistently pushed the boundaries of fiction in his effort to capture the zeitgeist. In The Body Artist, DeLillo tells the hallucinatory tale of performance artist Lauren Hartke in the days following the suicide of her husband, filmmaker Rey Robles. Finishing out their lease of a rented house on the coast, living in a self-imposed exile, Lauren discovers a mysterious man in the bedroom upstairs who is able to repeat — verbatim — entire conversations she had with her husband before his death but does not seem to know his own name or where he came from.
What do you think about the talent coming abord the next DeLillo adaptation?