So we can scratch Stephen Daldry off the wishlist for “Twilight: Breaking Dawn.”
Daldry is now attached to direct an adaptation of Jonathan Safran Foer’s celebrated novel “Extremely Loud And Incredibly Close.” Scott Rudin who produced “The Hours” will continue those duties here while Eric Roth (“The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button,” “Munich”) has written the script.
Here’s the synopsis of the book from Publisher’s Weekly below:
Oskar Schell, hero of this brilliant follow-up to Foer’s bestselling Everything Is Illuminated, is a nine-year-old amateur inventor, jewelry designer, astrophysicist, tambourine player and pacifist. Like the second-language narrator of Illuminated, Oskar turns his naïvely precocious vocabulary to the understanding of historical tragedy, as he searches New York for the lock that matches a mysterious key left by his father when he was killed in the September 11 attacks, a quest that intertwines with the story of his grandparents, whose lives were blighted by the firebombing of Dresden. Foer embellishes the narrative with evocative graphics, including photographs, colored highlights and passages of illegibly overwritten text, and takes his unique flair for the poetry of miscommunication to occasionally gimmicky lengths, like a two-page soliloquy written entirely in numerical code. Although not quite the comic tour de force that Illuminated was, the novel is replete with hilarious and appalling passages, as when, during show-and-tell, Oskar plays a harrowing recording by a Hiroshima survivor and then launches into a Poindexterish disquisition on the bomb’s “charring effect.” It’s more of a challenge to play in the same way with the very recent collapse of the towers, but Foer gambles on the power of his protagonist’s voice to transform the cataclysm from raw current event to a tragedy at once visceral and mythical. Unafraid to show his traumatized characters’ constant groping for emotional catharsis, Foer demonstrates once again that he is one of the few contemporary writers willing to risk sentimentalism in order to address great questions of truth, love and beauty.
The ambitiously conceived novel certainly poses an intriguing challenge in bringing it to the bring screen, but seems imbued with the sort of magical elements that Roth seems to have excelled at (for better or worse) in projects like “Benjamin Button” and “Forrest Gump.”
There’s no word yet on when filming is set to begin, but we think given the pedigree Paramount and Warner Bros. who are co-financing the picture, will be aiming for an Oscar season 2011 release.