It has been a couple of years now since "Micmacs," the last film from "Amelie" director Jean-Pierre Jeunet, and as he generally takes a few years between pictures, now is about the time for the helmer to start gearing up make another. Over the summer it was revealed that the helmer had acquired the rights to two books for possible future projects: Reif Larsen's 2009 novel "The Selected Works Of T.S. Spivet" and Thomas H. Cook's crime tome "Red Leaves." It was assumed the former would go in front of cameras first, and indeed that is the case and few more details have arrived today about the project.
French film site Allocine (via HeyUGuys) reports that next summer, Jeunet will get to work on "The Selected Works Of T.S. Spivet" and it will find the director bringing his distinct visual eye to the 3D format for the first time, and making his first English language movie since "Alien: Resurrection" in 1997. Pretty exciting stuff indeed.
Co-written with his "Amelie" co-writer Guillaume Laurant, 'Spivet' revolves around a 12-year-old cartography enthusiast in an eccentric family, who travels across country hidden on board a freight train after being invited to the Smithsonian Institute. So yes, it's right in Jeunet's typically fantastical wheelhouse. But as he reveals, Larsen only had a select and high profile few directors in mind to make a movie out of his book, and luckily for Jeunet, he was the first one to give him a ring.
"When I contacted the author, he said that there were five directors with whom he wanted to make the film: David Fincher, Wes Anderson, Tim Burton, Michel Gondry and myself. I was the first to contact him. Since then, we haven't stopped working," Jeunet said. And we presume those names are a good indicator of the kind of tone the illustration rich material has. We're definitely always excited to see what Jeunet conjures up next, and this certainly has all the usual whimsical ingredients the director works with.
Lensing will take place in Canada next summer with Gaumont slated to distribute the movie in France. More details to come as the production gears up.