Peter Webber to direct New Zealand drama The Colour

Girl with a Pearl Earring director Peter Webber is New Zealand-bound.

The director set to direct the adaptation of Rose Tremain’s novel The Colour, with Tremain writing the screenplay from her own novel.

The film has been developed by producer Ray Marshall’s Festival Films and will be co-produced with New Zealand producer Tim Coddington’s Nukuhau Films as an official NZ/UK co-production. 

The film will be shot in New Zealand in 2014.

Set in the New Zealand gold rush in the 1860’s, The Colour tells the story of newly-married immigrants Joseph and Harriet Blackstone, who have travelled to New Zealand with Joseph’s widowed mother. Finding life as a small farmer more difficult than he expected, Joseph sets out to make his fortune in the Gold Rush. It’s a disastrous decision - and one which will change their lives forever.

“It’s taken 9 years to bring this wonderful book to the screen. It’s an extraordinary story and we are delighted that Peter has agreed to direct. Tim and I believe that his incredible visual sensitivity makes him the perfect person to bring the book to life,” commented Ray Marshall.

“I’m very excited about the prospect of returning to New Zealand to shoot The Colour. It’s an amazing novel, which has an enormous dramatic and visual canvas. Though it has a period setting, the story is about greed and despair, which gives it a real contemporary resonance,” Webber commented.

Ray Marshall has just co-produced Are We Officialy Dating, starring Zac Efron and Imogen Poots, and Tim Coddington’s recent producing credits include Andrew Adamson’s Mister Pip, starring Hugh Laurie, and Peter Webber’s Emperor, starring Matthew Fox and Tommy Lee Jones.