Look, Richard Linklater may not have won the Oscar this past Sunday for his work on Boyhood, but that does not make him any less of a filmmaker. And I hope now with the exposure Boyhood has received, more people will feel inclined to check out what he has coming up. And, thankfully for us, he is keeping himself busy.
He has a new film called That’s What I’m Talking About presumably coming out later this year, and he is in talks to align himself with another project. This would be the adaptation of Maria Semple‘s best-selling novel Where’d You Go, Bernadette.[amz asin=”B006L8942U” size=”small”]
Bernadette Fox is notorious. To her Microsoft-guru husband, she’s a fearlessly opinionated partner; to fellow private-school mothers in Seattle, she’s a disgrace; to design mavens, she’s a revolutionary architect, and to 15-year-old Bee, she is a best friend and, simply, Mom.
Then Bernadette disappears. It began when Bee aced her report card and claimed her promised reward: a family trip to Antarctica. But Bernadette’s intensifying allergy to Seattle–and people in general–has made her so agoraphobic that a virtual assistant in India now runs her most basic errands. A trip to the end of the earth is problematic.
To find her mother, Bee compiles email messages, official documents, secret correspondence–creating a compulsively readable and touching novel about misplaced genius and a mother and daughter’s role in an absurd world.
He would be taking on a script by Fault in Our Stars scribes Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber, who I think are two of the more talented screenwriters working today. The Fault in Our Stars did not really work for me, but I blame a lot of that on John Green’s original novel. Aside from that, (500) Days of Summer is a pretty great film, and The Spectacular Now is one of my favorites of the past several years and Neustadter and Weber were behind both.
Linklater’s naturalistic style could make for an interesting mesh with Neustadter and Weber, who have the ability to be a bit stylized in their writing. I am extremely interested in seeing how this one turns out.
Original report from The Hollywood Reporter.
