MULAN Director Niki Caro To Helm BEAUTIFUL RUINS For Amblin
Amblin Partners has hired Mulan director Niki Caro to direct its upcoming film Beautiful Ruins. Caro also directed the film’s Whale Rider, The Zookeeper’s Wife, and Anne With an E. She’s made some solid films in her career and this next project sounds like a good one for her.
The story is set in an Italian seaside village in 1962, “where a charming young man runs a hotel with no guests, until one day an American starlet, fresh from the set of ‘Cleopatra,’ appears and captures his heart. Five decades later in Hollywood, a jaded assistant to a once-powerhouse producer gets caught up in the magic of the Italian’s story, and takes it upon herself to find a happy ending.”
The movie is based on the New York Times bestseller written by Jess Walter, and the script is going to be written by Mark Hammer and Chiara Atik, from an earlier draft by Micah Fitzerman-Blue and Noah Harpster.
Here’s the destitution of the book:
The story begins in 1962. On a rocky patch of the sun-drenched Italian coastline, a young innkeeper, chest-deep in daydreams, looks out over the incandescent waters of the Ligurian Sea and spies an apparition: a tall, thin woman, a vision in white, approaching him on a boat. She is an actress, he soon learns, an American starlet, and she is dying.
And the story begins again today, half a world away, when an elderly Italian man shows up on a movie studio's back lot—searching for the mysterious woman he last saw at his hotel decades earlier.
What unfolds is a dazzling, yet deeply human, roller coaster of a novel, spanning fifty years and nearly as many lives. From the lavish set of Cleopatra to the shabby revelry of the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, Walter introduces us to the tangled lives of a dozen unforgettable characters: the starstruck Italian innkeeper and his long-lost love; the heroically preserved producer who once brought them together and his idealistic young assistant; the army veteran turned fledgling novelist and the rakish Richard Burton himself, whose appetites set the whole story in motion—along with the husbands and wives, lovers and dreamers, superstars and losers, who populate their world in the decades that follow.
Gloriously inventive, constantly surprising, Beautiful Ruins is a story of flawed yet fascinating people, navigating the rocky shores of their lives while clinging to their improbable dreams.
Source: Variety