Matt Damon and Keira Knightley have reportedly been offered the lead roles in a new 20th Century Fox adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1934 classic “Tender Is The Night.”
The novel, which was Fitzgerald’s follow up to “The Great Gatsby,” follows the disintegration of a young American psychoanalyst who resides in a villa on the French Riviera in the 1920’s with his wealthy, heiress patient-turned-wife. Damon is being lined up to play the husband Dick Diver with period-film-specialist Knightley to play his wife, Nicole.
Author David Nicholls, whose novel “One Day” is currently being adapted by Lone Scherfig, penned the script for “Tender Is With Night” with no director yet attached to the project. We’d imagine there’d be no shortage of suitors if Damon and Knightley do sign up but, as news-breakers Pajiba recently tweeted regarding stories about talent being offered roles, “you just never know which one is going to convert.”
Knightley’s connection to the new project seemingly marks the demise of John Curran’s Fitzgerald biopic, “The Beautiful And The Damned,” which Knightley was attached to star in opposite Leonardo DiCaprio, and was supposed to shoot this spring. “Tender Is The Night” is inspired by Fitzgerald’s own life though — both explore ideas of psychology, turbulent marriages and illustrious lifestyles on the French Riviera — so perhaps they simply traded a biopic of the great author for an adaptation of his last completed novel.
It remains to be seen when this production could come together. Damon has a pretty tight schedule, currently shooting the Coen Brothers’ “True Grit” with Steven Soderbergh’s “Contagion” and “Liberace,” the Robert F. Kennedy biopic and possibly the Yankees wife-swapping pic on the horizon. Knightley, meanwhile, just signed up to Noah Baumbach’s adaptation of “The Emperor’s Children” and will be shooting David Cronenberg’s newly-retitled “The Dangerous Method” this May.
