John Crowley, the director of Brooklyn, is to helm an adaptation of Donna Tartt's much-admired novel The Goldfinch. Peter Straughan, an Oscar nominee for Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, has already written the script. Nina Jacobson, whose credits include the blockbusting Hunger Games series, will be among the producers.
The adaptation was one of the most sought-after projects in Hollywood. Published in 2013, Tartt’s novel is a lengthy Bildungsroman concerning a New Yorker who, as a young boy, acquires Carel Fabritius’s titular painting following a terrorist attack and is propelled into a variety of unlikely adventures.
The book won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2014. Surprisingly, though Ms Tartt's two earlier novels, The Secret History and The Little Friend, were great successes, The Goldfinch will be the first of her works to become a film.
The news is just the latest in a string of triumphs for the Corkonian director. Educated at University College Cork, he directed at the Gate and the Abbey while still in his 20s, before moving to London where he became an associate director at the Donmar Warehouse. His feature film debut, Intermission, a portmanteau comedy starring Colin Farrell, was hugely praised in 2003. He also received raves for the TV movie Boy A.
But it was Brooklyn, an adaptation of Colm Tóibín's popular novel, that really earned him a seat at the head table. That film received three Oscar nominations earlier this year, including one for best picture.
Before he launches into The Goldfinch, Crowley is to direct Cate Blanchett in her Broadway debut, The Present. Andrew Upton's piece, a version of an early play by Chekov, will co-star Blanchett's fellow Australian Richard Roxburgh. The busy director is also slated to work on a film of John Banville's novel The Black-Eyed Blonde. Produced by Parallel Films, The Black-Eyed Blonde (a creation of Banville's crime-writing alter ego Benjamin Black) has development funding in place from The Irish Film Board.
