In January of this year, a producer working on the adaptation of Mark Jude Poirier’s 2000 coming-of-age tale “Goats,” revealed the cast on a Facebook page (since taken down, but we noticed and reported it).
While the cast may have been premature, the post had pegged Hopper Penn — the son of Sean Penn and Robin Wright — to star, plus actors David Duchovny, Robin Wright, Josh Brolin, Jason Schwartzman and Robert Schwartzman.
To be directed by first time feature-length filmmaker Christopher Neil — an acting coach who is a part of the Coppola family through marriage; Sofia Coppola is an executive producer on the project — there seems to be some updates via Production Weekly this week (issue not available online).
While none of the aforementioned cast is listed, PWeekly does list out, Anjelica Huston, Thomas Haden Church and Ty Burrell (ABC’s “Modern Family”).
Neil was apparently recommended to George Lucas as a coach by none other than Francis Ford Coppola and then Lucas and Coppola’s American Zoetrope studio later optioned “Goats” and tapped the book’s author Poirier to write a script.
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.
It appears that most of that juicy-sounding casting has bailed, but take it with a grain of salt, IMDB still lists Jason Schwartzman. Production on the film is slated to begin later this year in New Mexico where tax credits for films are a big incentive.
