Neil Jordan has added another project to his slowly growing plate. He’s currently working on the Showtime series “The Borgias,” a period crime drama set in late 13th century Italy. He also recently signed on to write and direct an adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s “The Graveyard Book,” a project that has financing but last we heard, didn’t have a production timeline mapped out. Now, another adaptation has grabbed the director’s attention.
Deadline reports that Jordan is set to write and direct “Skippy Dies” based on the Booker prize long-listed novel by Paul Murray. The intriguing premise “follows the adventures of two unlikely schoolmates, Skippy and Ruprecht, at an Irish private school” and has is being “described as “‘South Park’ meets ‘Tom Brown’s Schooldays'” (the latter being an old timey Brit book about the wholesome shenanigans at a public boy’s school). And certainly the Amazon book description points to something a little different from the standard school tale:
Ruprecht Van Doren is an overweight genius whose hobbies include very difficult maths and the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence. Daniel ‘Skippy’ Juster is his roommate. In the grand old Dublin institution that is Seabrook College for Boys, nobody pays either of them much attention. But when Skippy falls for Lori, the Frisbee-playing Siren from the girls’ school next door, suddenly all kinds of people take an interest – including Carl, part-time drug-dealer and official school psychopath. While his teachers battle over modernisation, and Ruprecht attempts to open a portal into a parallel universe, Skippy, in the name of love, is heading for a showdown – in the form of a fatal doughnut-eating race that only one person will survive. This unlikely tragedy will explode Seabrook’s century-old complacency and bring all kinds of secrets into the light, until teachers and pupils alike discover that the fragile lines dividing past from present, love from betrayal – and even life from death – have become almost impossible to read…
And the project is potentially quite big. Murray’s novel is a three volume, 600-page-plus opus, so it will be interesting to see how Jordan approaches the material. No word yet on where this will fall in Jordan’s schedule but seeing as how a script still needs to be written, it’s probably a ways off yet.