Peter Bart and Mike Fleming Jr.’s column “Bart & Fleming” over at Deadline is usually more about discussing the weekly news than actually breaking anything, but their column today revealed two possible projects SELMA director Ava DuVerney is being “courted” for: a Colin Trevorrow-scripted thriller called INTELLIGENT LIFE and an adaptation of Madeleine L’Engle’s A WRINKLE IN TIME.
INTELLIGENT LIFE (which was originally called THE AMBASSADOR, and was co-written by Derek Connolly) might star Lupita Nyong’o as the extra-terrestrial love interest of a U.N worker tasked with making first contact with alien life. That’s over at Universal/Amblin, with Frank Marshall producing.
A WRINKLE IN TIME, if you didn’t read it in middle school, is about an adolescent girl, her younger brother, and a local boy who transport through space and time in search for the siblings’ father. That’s being developed at Disney, with the current script having been written by Jennifer Lee (FROZEN, WRECK-IT RALPH).
I find it bizarre that the consensus for what DuVerney’s next step as a director should be seems to be a high-profile genre picture. I figured when she didn’t take BLACK PANTHER that it was because it the kind of thing she wanted to follow up SELMA with, but if she’s taking these two projects seriously, it might’ve simply been the lack of creative control typically granted to Marvel’s directors. It’s possible, however cynical, that Nyong’o’s offer was announced hot on the heels of DuVerney’s potential participation to help sway her over to INTELLIGENT LIFE to the earlier-in-development WRINKLE, but, again, there’s no guarantee she’ll take either of these gigs. She’s in that fortunate, rare position where she has her pick of what kind of film she wants to take on next, which will also define what kind of directing career she has going forward. We shall wait and see what choice she makes.
Would you like DuVerney to take on one of these projects, or something else entirely?
