Noyce eyes dystopian adaptation.
Jeff Sneider over at Variety is hearing word that Phillip Noyce (‘Salt,’ ‘The Bone Collector’) is in early talks to take the director’s chair on an adaptation of Lois Lowry’s award winning young adult novel ‘The Giver.’
Released in 1993, ‘The Giver’ is set in a colourless dystopian society in which all memory of human history has been erased, emotion does not exist and citizens have their professions chosen for them. The fantasy tale follows Jonas, a 12-year-old boy whose life is thrown into turmoil when he is designated to inherit the role of the Giver and bear his community’s vast range of human emotions, which causes him to realize that living a pain-free life comes at a high cost.
Long-in-development, the adaptation has Jeff Bridges attached to play the title role and produce with the most recent draft of the screenplay coming from Vadim Perelman (‘House of Sand and Fog’), who was previously attached direct.
With two loosely-related companion novels, ‘Gathering Blue’ and ‘Messenger,’ and a fourth novel, ‘Son’ which ties all three storylines together in an epic conclusion, producers are looking at ‘The Giver’ as a potential franchise.