Director Joe Wright has had a meteoric rise directing adaptations. His feature film debut Pride & Prejudice scored four Oscar nods, including a nomination for leading lady Keira Knightley. Next was Atonement, which scored seven Oscar nominations, including one for Best Picture. Admittedly The Soloist, which was based on the book by Steve Lopez, just came and went, but now that Hanna, the first original screenplay Wright’s taken on, is earning rave reviews (you can read mine here), Wright is teasing a trio of pictures he’d like to produce.
According to The Playlist, Wright’s next venture will be to adapt Leo Tolstoy’s classic romantic tragedy Anna Karenina. Wright has already signed on Knightley to play the ill-fated eponymous heroine, and Jude Law and Aaron Johnson (Kick-Ass) will fill out the treacherous love triangle, playing her husband and young lover respectively. Also officially onboard are Benedict Cumberbatch (Atonement) and Kelly Macdonald (No Country For Old Men), and Wright’s pursuing a full-scale Atonement reunion, attempting to cast Hanna star Saoirse Ronan and James McAvoy as well. But he admits, “I’m not sure about James, he recently just had a baby so [he’s busy].”
Notably Ronan may also be too busy to take part, as she may be reuniting with Lovely Bones director Peter Jackson on The Hobbit, which could prove a scheduling conflict too big to overcome. (Yet, if it comes down to working with Wright or Jackson, it should be an easy call for Ronan. One guy got her an Oscar nod while the other – I mean has she seen The Lovely Bones?) Regardless of Ronan or MacAvoy’s involvment, Wright’s talent for casting and coaxing poignant performances from his actors has me eager to see his Anna.
Once he’s completed Anna Karenina, Wright’s looking to bring to screen the biography Stanley: The Impossible Life of Africa’s Greatest Explorer, which was scribed by Tim Jeal. The film, tentatively titled Stanley, would follow the iconic adventures of Sir Henry Morton Stanley, the fearless explorer who is credited with inspiring Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and having coined the phrase, “Dr. Livingstone, I presume.” However, despite Wright’s fervor to delve into the journeys of Stanley, he has no set schedule for when the film would be produced, wisely admitting, “A career is what happens when you’re developing other screenplays.”
To that end, Wright is in development on an adaptation Hans Christian Andersen’s classic tale The Little Mermaid with hopes of Ronan starring, “If we do it soon enough.” However, Wright admits he’s hesitant to craft the would-be feature with the current mania surrounding revisionist fairy tales, saying, “To be honest, when I was first developing it, there were no fairy tale films being made. And now I think there are about 8 or 9 being made now. So I think I might wait until that passes and do it later.”
He went onto explain he’d hate for his film to be swept up in a trend and thereby, “be compared to this or that or the other. I try not to get involved in that kind of competitive filmmaking.” So while Working Title, who produced Pride & Prejudice and Atonement, may be eager to greenlight the project while the fairy tale is a hot commodity, Wright’s reluctant to have his film lost in the fray of fairy stories set to hit theaters in the coming seasons. Which is a shame, as his Little Mermaid, scribed Abi Morgan (Brick Lane), sounds like something worth seeing. Based on Wright’s history of crafting complex and three-dimensional heroines and breathing a vibrant life into dusty tales, I expect Wright’s Mermaid would be something truly special. I guess for now, it’ll just have to be something worth waiting for.
Which Wright project are you most intrigued by?