WEIRDLAND: Next Kirsten Film

Wednesday, November 08, 2006

Next Kirsten Film

"Paramount Vantage has acquired A.N. Wilson's novel "A Jealous Ghost" for Kirsten Dunst to star in and produce. Film 360, Management 360's feature film label, also is on board to produce the supernatural thriller, which is being adapted by Virginia-based scribe Megan Holley.

360's Ben Forkner discovered the 2005 book while on a trip to London last year. He immediately thought of Dunst, who had said she was interested in finding a dark, elevated psychological thriller in the vein of "The Shining" and Roman Polanski's "Repulsion."


Shelley Duvall as Wendy in "The Shining" by Stanley Kubrick.

Catherine Deneuve as Carole in "Repulsion" by Roman Polanski.

Dunst has not appeared in a dark supernatural thriller since 1994's "Interview With the Vampire," the movie that launched her to stardom.

Dunst, Forkner and her manager, 360's Eric Kranzler, developed a take with Holley before bringing the project to Paramount Vantage.

Holley's take detours from the book, which is written in third-person omniscient, dropping certain elements while creating new characters and story points. The take sees Dunst playing a young woman studying in London who, upon beginning a relationship with one of her professors, starts seeing demons.

Producing for 360 are Kranzler, Forkner and Daniel Rappaport."
Source: Hollywoodreporter
Thanks to Hedda Parsons for the heads-up!

Researching for this book I found this about the novel:
"There is something rather disquieting about Sallie Declan, a young American in London, and it is not just her obsession with Henry James's The Turn of the Screw, the subject of her PhD thesis. There is her decision, almost casually taken, to leave her studies for a temporary job as a nanny in a large country house. She seems to display astonishing naivety as she builds a fantasy about her emotional future there. Surely she can see it is all delusion? But a progressively darker reality unfolds as we are led inexorably towards a terrible and shocking climax. With A Jealous Ghost A. N. Wilson has written a masterpiece to rival even that of the master himself, Henry James." Source: Fantasticfiction.co.uk

"His novels include The Healing Art (Somerset Maugham Award), Wise Virgin (WH Smith Award). His study of the Victorian age, The Victorians, was published by Hutchinson in 2002 to massive critical acclaim." extracted from Amazon.com
I'm an usual reader of this genre and I was myself obsessed with Henry James and three adaptations of his novel "The turn of the screw":

"The turn of the screw" (1959) by John Frankenheimer, "The Innocents"(1961) by Jack Clayton and "The Others" (2001) by Alejandro AmenĂ¡bar.

4 comments :

Anonymous said...

i hope this is true.she will be great in it!!

Anonymous said...

This is great, i'm really impressed with Kristen!!

jn-girl said...

"Repulsion" is great...I love CD there

Elena said...

I'm sure lots of people will shut their Kirsten-bashing mouths in the long run, heddaparsons ;)

Indeed, jacknastygirl, "Repulsion" was one of the best performances from Catherine Deneuve.