Sam Mendes Making With the Funny for Focus Features
Following up Revolution Road with Eggers/Vida script.
He made his cinematic bones with dramatic films such as American Beauty and Road to Perdition, but director Sam Mendes wasn't born without a funny bone, and he's about to prove it.
Variety reports that Mendes has signed on to direct "an untitled contemporary comedy" for Focus Features this spring. Previously titled This Must Be the Place, the film will be based on a screenplay by Dave Eggers and Vendela Vida, the husband-and-wife duo best known, respectively, for writing A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius and editing The Believer magazine.
According to the article, the film "follows a young couple's journey around the U.S. as they search for somewhere to put down roots and raise the baby they are expecting"; no casting has been confirmed yet, but with a start scheduled for March, that should change rather quickly.
Mendes, currently finishing the Kate Winslet/Leonardo DiCaprio drama Revolutionary Road for DreamWorks, had planned on adapting George Eliot's Middlemarch next, but -- as Variety puts it -- "after so much heavy-duty drama, Mendes decided that it was time to flex his comedic muscles."
Source: Variety
Variety reports that Mendes has signed on to direct "an untitled contemporary comedy" for Focus Features this spring. Previously titled This Must Be the Place, the film will be based on a screenplay by Dave Eggers and Vendela Vida, the husband-and-wife duo best known, respectively, for writing A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius and editing The Believer magazine.
According to the article, the film "follows a young couple's journey around the U.S. as they search for somewhere to put down roots and raise the baby they are expecting"; no casting has been confirmed yet, but with a start scheduled for March, that should change rather quickly.
Mendes, currently finishing the Kate Winslet/Leonardo DiCaprio drama Revolutionary Road for DreamWorks, had planned on adapting George Eliot's Middlemarch next, but -- as Variety puts it -- "after so much heavy-duty drama, Mendes decided that it was time to flex his comedic muscles."
Source: Variety
Related Items
| Movie: | Road to Perdition |
| Revolutionary Road | |
| Celeb: | Leonardo DiCaprio |
| Kate Winslet | |
| George Eliot | |
| Sam Mendes | |
| Dave Eggers |
(1-4 of 4 posts) | Reply
 on Jan 25 2008 09:33 AM cool. but on the subtitle you wrote 'revolution road' instead of the 'revolutionary.' i only mention it because it reminded me of that lame-looking 'reservation road' movie. just a detail. (Reply to this) |
 on Jan 25 2008 02:15 PM Sam Mendes is awesome, one of the only directors ever to start off with three great films, I'm really looking forward to his next one. This sounds ineresting, I hope he really can do a full out comedy, American Beauty and Jarhead had little moments. (Reply to this) |
 on Jan 25 2008 11:50 PM I thought Jarhead was hilarious. If it had stuck more to the book it would have been even funnier, in a sick kind of way. (Reply to this) |
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on Jan 26 2008 02:32 PM American Beauty was terribly comic. I trust Sam with anything they can throw at him. (Reply to this) |
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