Tom Hanks and Sandra Bullock to star in EXTREMELY LOUD & INCREDIBLY CLOSE: A NOVEL
Tom Hanks and Sandra Bullock are attached to star in the film adaptation of Jonathan Safran Foer's 2005 book Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close: A Novel. Paramount Pictures and Warner Bros. have teamed up to bring this story to the big screen, and they've hired Eric Roth (Forrest Gump) to write the script, and Stephen Daldry (Billy Elliot, The Reader) to direct the film.
The book is actually a follow-up to Foer's first novel Everything is Illuminated, which was adapted by Liev Schreiber in 2005 which starred Elijah Wood.
The story is told through multiple narratives, but the main focus of the story is Hanks and Bullock's characters intelligent but quirky 9-year-old son Oscar Schell, who has yet to be cast. In the novel, Oskar is looking for a lock that matches a key left behind by his father after he died on 9/11.
Sounds like this could be a pretty powerful story. The movie will most likely start shooting in mid-January in New York.
Here's a description of the book:
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.
