Academy Award-winning actress Cate Blanchett is gearing up to direct her first feature film. Deadline brings word that the Blue Jasmine star will helm an adaptation of Herman Koch’s 2009 novel, The Dinner. Published in the United States earlier this year, the book is officially described as follows:
It’s a summer’s evening in Amsterdam, and two couples meet at a fashionable restaurant for dinner. Between mouthfuls of food and over the polite scrapings of cutlery, the conversation remains a gentle hum of polite discourse — the banality of work, the triviality of the holidays. But behind the empty words, terrible things need to be said, and with every forced smile and every new course, the knives are being sharpened.
Each couple has a fifteen-year-old son. The two boys are united by their accountability for a single horrific act; an act that has triggered a police investigation and shattered the comfortable, insulated worlds of their families. As the dinner reaches its culinary climax, the conversation finally touches on their children. As civility and friendship disintegrate, each couple show just how far they are prepared to go to protect those they love.
Oren Moverman is adapting the screenplay with Cotty Chubb set to produce and Eva Maria Daniels and Olga Segura executive producing. There’s no word yet on whether or not Blanchett, who can next be seen in George Clooney’s The Monuments Men, will also star.
(Photo Credit: WENN.com)
