In his relatively short time kicking around the movie world, Adam Driver has done it right, logging time with Clint Eastwood (“J. Edgar“), Noah Baumbach (“Frances Ha“), Steven Spielberg (“Lincoln“) and the Coen Brothers (“Inside Llewyn Davis“), all while maintaining his day job as Hannah Horvath’s grunting boyfriend on “Girls.” So what’s the next box he’s going check off on his movie director bucket list? Martin Scorsese.
While officially it’s not quite 100%, it’s widely expected that Scorsese will shoot his long, long-developing dream project “Silence” this year, and Driver has joined the cast. An adaptation of Shusaku Endo‘s novel, the story will follow two 17th-century Jesuit priests who face violence and persecution when they travel to Japan to locate their mentor and to spread the gospel of Christianity. Driver will join a cast that includes Andrew Garfield, Ken Watanabe and Issei Ogata with a July shoot previously reported. And don’t forget, Driver is reportedly also up for a role in “Star Wars: Episode 7.” [Showbiz 411]
Stefan Ruzowitzky, the director behind the Oscar-winning “The Counterfeiters” (and more recently the Charlie Hunnam/Olivia Wilde/Eric Bana crime flick “Blackbird“) is getting set to helm “The Kitchen Boy.” Kristin Scott Thomas will star in the film, based on the book by Robert Alexander and adapted by Ronald Harwood (“The Pianist,” “The Diving Bell And The Butterfly“), about “the final weeks in the lives of Russia’s last tsar and tsarina, Nicholas II and Alexandra Romanov, and their children, when the family was banished to Siberia. It is told though the eyes of a young servant…Thomas will play Alexandra Romanov, the German-born empress and mother of five children.” Production is gearing up for the summer. [THR]
Lastly, Kristen Wiig and Alexander Skarsgård are set to star in first-time director Marielle Heller‘s “The Diary Of A Teenage Girl.” Heller also adapted the script that’s based on the critically-acclaimed graphic novel by Phoebe Gloeckner that tells the story of a brutally honest teenage artist living in San Francisco in the ’70s as she attempts to navigate her way through an affair with her mother’s boyfriend. British actress Bel Powley is in the lead, with production underway in San Francisco.