Hugh Laurie Set to Star in Film Adaptation of MR. PIP
House's Hugh Laurie is set to play the main character in a new film based on the best-selling Lloyd Jones novel Mr. Pip. The big screen adaptation will be written and directed by Andrew Adamson who also worked on Shrek and The Chronicles of Narnia movies.
The film will tell the story of the last white man left on the war-torn island of Bougainville, Papua New Guinea, who reopens a school and reads his favorite novel, Great Expectations, to the students, inspiring a gifted 14-year-old named Matilda.
Here's what the director had to say about the film in a statement:
I read Mr. Pip on a transatlantic flight and, by the time of landing, knew I would make this film. It's a testament to Lloyd’s wonderful novel that it has captured the hearts of Hugh, Robin, Leslie and an incredible group of like minded collaborators.
Laurie went on to say this:
From the first words of the novel, and the first image of the screenplay, I was hooked on Mr. Pip. It's an immensely touching, unique, yet completely unsentimental story of love. It is unlike any script I have read, or any story I have ever heard. Plus I get to go to Papua New Guinea and call it work. I am a very lucky man.
The filmmakers plan to start shooting in New Zealand and on location on Bougainville in May. This sounds like a very inspiring story that will make for a great film worth watching.
Here's the description of the book:
In a novel that is at once intense, beautiful, and fablelike, Lloyd Jones weaves a transcendent story that celebrates the resilience of the human spirit and the power of narrative to transform our lives.
On a copper-rich tropical island shattered by war, where the teachers have fled with most everyone else, only one white man chooses to stay behind: the eccentric Mr. Watts, object of much curiosity and scorn, who sweeps out the ruined schoolhouse and begins to read to the children each day from Charles Dickens’s classic Great Expectations.
So begins this rare, original story about the abiding strength that imagination, once ignited, can provide. As artillery echoes in the mountains, thirteen-year-old Matilda and her peers are riveted by the adventures of a young orphan named Pip in a city called London, a city whose contours soon become more real than their own blighted landscape. As Mr. Watts says, “A person entranced by a book simply forgets to breathe.” Soon come the rest of the villagers, initially threatened, finally inspired to share tales of their own that bring alive the rich mythology of their past. But in a ravaged place where even children are forced to live by their wits and daily survival is the only objective, imagination can be a dangerous thin