Way back in February 2009, it was announced thatFox Searchlight had snapped up the rights to SG Browne’s novel **Breathers: A Zombie’s Lament **for Diablo Cody to oversee as producer. Now, according to Pajiba’s sources, the project is starting to attract actors, with Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Scarlett Johansson “loosely attached” according to Pajiba.
While the phrase is purposefully vague, and most likely points to Gordon-Levitt and Johansson moving the project to their “possible” piles and consulting with agents/managers on the idea, it certainly seems like the script, by Going the Distance scribe Geoff LaTulippe, is generating some healthy buzz, so not the noise of flies flitting around a freshly dead corpse which sometimes accompanies work in development.
Cody herself has said that she’s thrilled with how LaTulippe’s screenplay turned out, so it seems only logical that the producers are trying to attract some talent to get moving on the zom-rom-com.
Breathers focuses on Andy, a dead man re-animated as a mid-aged, decaying zombie who must deal with life after death in a society that treats his kind with disdain and inequality. Metaphor alert!
Cody, of course, is busy with several other things: she’s got the next season of TV comedy drama The United States Of Tara to produce (which has just added Eddie Izzard and Frances Conroy to its cast) and her most recent film script, Young Adult, which is inching towards production with Charlize Theron attached to star and Jason Reitman directing. But it looks like this one might go - so is Levitt the right choice for the flaking, putrefying lead?