While his most recent release – Micmacs – never quite lived up to the likes of Amelie and Delicatessen, we’re always intrigued and enthusiastic when Jean-Pierre Jeunet starts digging up a new project. And now he has not one, but two likely films on his radar, since he’s just snapped up the rights to Reif Larsen’s novel The Selected Works of TS Spivet and Thomas H Cook’s book Red Leaves.
Let’s tackle Spivet first, shall we? It sounds like solid material for the writer/director, since it follows a 12-year-old cartographer making a journey across America from Montana to the Smithsonian Museum in Washington. The book’s style blends reality and fantasy as the child’s imagination works wonders on the trip. Definite Jeunet potential there, we think you’d agree. It’ll also serve as his first English-language pic since (whisper it) Alien Resurrection back in 1997.
While Jeunet is at work adapting Spivet alongside regular collaborator Guillaume Laurant, which makes it sound like it’ll be the next film to go before his cameras, he still has one eye on** R****ed Leaves**.
That one definitely promises to be darker, since it focuses on the father of a 15-year-old boy who’s accused of kidnapping an eight-year-old. As the situation worsens, the man’s world starts to fall apart…