It feels like there’s too many directors we have to say this about, but it’s been way too long since we’ve seen anything from Polish-British director Pawel Pawlikowski. After starting in documentaries, his feature debut “The Last Resort” garnered a huge amount of attention, while follow-up “My Summer of Love,” which introduced the world to Emily Blunt, was one of the best British films of recent years.
He began work in 2006 on an adaptation of Magnus Mills’ novel “The Restraint of Beasts,” starring Ben Whishaw, Rhys Ifans and Eddie Marsan, but, tragically, the director’s wife became seriously ill, and later died, and filming was suspended half-way through; it remains uncompleted, and will likely never see the light of day. Since then, he’s been attached to various projects, including an adaptation of the best selling non-fiction work “Young Stalin,” but he finally returned this year, having just wrapped on the Paris-set thriller “The Woman In The Fifth,” starring Ethan Hawke and Kristin Scott-Thomas.
The good news is, he’s already lining his next project, as Screen Daily are reporting that Pawlikowski has signed to an adaptation of the novel “We Are Now Beginning Our Descent,” from journalist-turned-novelist James Meek. The script is by Toby Finlay (“Dorian Gray”), and is being developed at Coded Pictures, who are behind the currently-filming thriller “Junkhearts” with Eddie Marsan and Romola Garai.
We read the novel a few years back, and it’s pretty excellent; it follows a Scottish foreign correspondent who begins an affair with an American reporter in Afghanistan in 2001, which sounds a little generic, but the novel is beautifully observed, and savage in its depiction of Western foreign policy, even if it does suffer from structural problems. Pawlikowski seems like a great fit for the material, and we hope the project makes its mooted start date next year. Now all we need is some movement on a film version of Meek’s unbelievably good earlier novel “The People’s Act of Love”; Johnny Depp picked up the movie rights a few years ago, and it screams out to be adapted.
