The cast for Christopher Neil’s coming-of-age tale “Goats” starring Hopper Penn — the son of Sean Penn and Robin Wright has been revealed — and what a cast it is.
David Duchovny, Robin Wright, Josh Brolin, Jason Schwartzman and Robert Schwartzman have all joined the adaptation of the Mark Jude Poirier’s 2000 novel of the same name. Not a bad bunch at all, is it?
But how did a first time director like Neil get such big name talent involved? Turns out Neil is an acting coach who is a part of the Coppola family through marriage, has worked with Sofia Coppola — an executive producer on the project — on all of her films and was apparently recommended to George Lucas as a coach by none other than Francis Ford Coppola. Lucas and Coppola’s American Zoetrope studio later optioned ‘Goats,’ tapped the book’s author Poirier to write a script and presumably brought Neil on to helm. We’ll reserve judgment on his directing abilities for now.
Here’s a synopsis of Poirier’s novel:
Fourteen-year-old Ellis is getting ready to leave the Southwest for a boarding school in the East. This means leaving behind his mother and the only real father he has ever known, Goat Man. Goat Man has done more for Ellis than giving him his first bong hit. He has maintained a home on Ellis’s mom’s property rent-free since Ellis was a child, taking care of small tasks and raising a herd of goats — all the while teaching Ellis the meaning of stability, caretaking, and commitment.
At boarding school, making the grade while staying (mostly) high, Ellis finds Goat Man’s influence thrown into stark relief. And when a skeptical Ellis returns for spring break, he and Goat Man are forced to reevaluate a relationship they thought was the only thing that would never change in their crazy lives.
Hilarious and intimate, Goats challenges the conventional idea of family and home while drawing us deeper into Ellis’s journey into manhood. Mark Jude Poirier has an uncanny gift for chronicling the human condition and bringing to life a varied yet dispassionate landscape.
In his first acting gig, Penn will obviously play Ellis, Wright will have the difficult job of playing Ellis’s mother while Duchovny will portray the Goat Man. It’s not yet known what role the Schwartzman brothers or Brolin will portray.
Production on the film is slated to begin later this year.