Some excellent casting news today with Screen Australia announcing the funding for an adaptation of Doris Lessing’s The Grandmothers with Naomi Watts and Robin Wright set to star.
THR are reporting that the actresses have signed up to the film and will be directed by Coco Before Chanel director Anne Fontaine. The Grandmothers is one of four short stories collected under in a book of the same name and the official blurb gives us this:
Two women, close friends, fall in love with each other’s teenage sons, and these passions last for years, until the women end them, promising a respectable old age.
while THR are keen to call it an ‘erotic tale of misguided love and a celebration of the enduring nature of female friendship’. Also cast are Xavier Samuel and James Frecheville, presumably as the teenage sons at the centre of the lovestorm.
Christopher Hampton, who recently adapted Atonement for Joe Wright and A Dangerous Method for David Cronenberg as well as winning a BAFTA and Oscar for his work in adapting Dangerous Liaisons, is scripting the film from the Lessing story so it’s fair to say Fontaine will have an excellent foundation to build on.
