Nick Hornby has adapted the film from the Colm Toibin bestseller set in 1950s Ireland and New York
Rooney Mara, the Oscar-nominated star of David Fincher’s The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, is to star in the lead role of Brooklyn, a film of Colm Toibin’s bestseller which will be produced by Finola Dwyer and Amanda Posey of the UK’s Wildgaze Films.
Nick Hornby has written the adaptation of Brooklyn, which is set in 1950s Ireland and New York and follows the young heroine Ellis Lacey as she has to choose between two men and two countries. The project will now go out to directors.
Dwyer and Posey who produced the multiple award-winning An Education in 2009 are now officially partnered in Wildgaze. Hornby, who also wrote An Education for the producers, is a company director.
Dwyer and Posey have shared offices for many years but Dwyer has now closed down her Finola Dwyer Productions label and rolled all her projects into Wildgaze. Separate to Wildgaze, Dwyer is currently in post-production on Quartet, the Dustin Hoffman-directed movie starring Maggie Smith and Tom Courtenay which is scheduled to premiere later this year.
BBC Films has helped finance the development of Brooklyn. Mara is currently shooting Steven Soderbergh’s The Bitter Pill, and is next booked into Spike Jonze’s new untitled project and Terrence Malick’s Lawless. She would then go into Brooklyn in spring 2013.
Wildgaze beat out several high profile contenders to snag the film rights to Brooklyn.
Meanwhile Wildgaze is preparing a film of Hornby’s book A Long Way Down to be directed by Pascal Chaumeil (Heartbreaker). As Hornby prefers not to adapt his own novels, Jack Thorne (This Is England 88, The Scouting Book For Boys) was drafted in to write the screenplay which is the darkly comic tale of four characters who meet on a rooftop one New Year’s Eve all planning to jump.
Pierce Brosnan, Toni Collette and Emile Hirsch are heading the cast of the film which is scheduled to shoot in September. HanWay Films is handling international sales at the upcoming Cannes Film Festival.
Chaumeil is in post on Fly Me To The Moon, a French-language romantic comedy for Heartbreaker production outfit Quad, which stars Diane Kruger and Dany Boon.
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