Update: Production will now kick off in April 2021, Screen Daily reports.
A24 is staying in the Claire Denis business. Following her wondrous, daring, frightening sci-fi odyssey High Life, released last year, they are now reteaming with the director for her next project. Last year, she announced she was developing an adaptation of The Stars at Noon, the 1986 novel from the late, brilliant writer Denis Johnson, with Robert Pattinson attached to star.
Now, Deadline reports that A24 has come aboard as has Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood star Margaret Qualley. Described as a “love story/thriller,” it follows a mysterious English businessman and headstrong American journalist who strike up a passionate romance in Nicaragua in 1984. Production is expected to kick off later this year, which could mean a 2021 release in the cards.
Check out the synopsis of the book below courtesy of Amazon:
Set in Nicaragua in 1984, The Stars at Noon is a story of passion, fear, and betrayal told in the voice of an American woman whose mission in Central America is as shadowy as her surroundings. Is she a reporter for an American magazine as she sometimes claims, or a contact person for Eyes of Peace? And who is the rough English businessman with whom she becomes involved? As the two foreigners become entangled in increasingly sinister plots, Denis Johnson masterfully dramatizes a powerful vision of spiritual bereavement and corruption.
The work of Johnson has been adapted before to the big screen, most notably with Jesus’ Son in 1999. His final work, the collection of short stories The Largesse of the Sea Maiden–one of my favorites books of the last decade–was published posthumously. Pattinson will next be seen in Tenet, The Devil All the Time, and The Batman, while Qualley leads the Berlinale premiere My Salinger Year and was just announced as part of the cast of Scott Cooper’s A Head Full of Ghosts.