James Franco has signed on to direct and star in a feature
film adaptation of Andre Dubus III's The Garden of Last Days, Deadline reports.
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| James Franco |
Franco has quite a bit of experience when it comes to
filmmaking, as he has helmed numerous short films as well as a few feature
length films.
Published in 2008, the book is officially described as
follows:
One early September night in Florida, a stripper brings her
daughter to work. April’s usual babysitter, Jean, has had a panic attack that
has landed her in the hospital. April doesn’t really know anyone else, so she
decides it’s best to have her three-year-old daughter close by, watching
children’s videos in the office while she works.
April works at the Puma Club for Men. And tonight she has an
unusual client, a foreigner both remote and too personal, and free with his
money. Lots of it, all cash. His name is Bassam. Meanwhile, another man, AJ,
has been thrown out of the club for holding hands with his favorite stripper,
and he’s drunk and angry and lonely.
From these explosive elements comes a relentless, raw,
searing, passionate, page-turning narrative, a big-hearted and painful novel
about sex and parenthood and honor and masculinity. Set in the seamy underside
of American life at the moment before the world changed, it juxtaposes lust for
domination with hunger for connection, sexual violence with family love. It
seizes the reader by the throat with the same psychological tension, depth, and
realism that characterized Andre Dubus III’s best-selling “House of Sand and
Fog” — and an even greater sense of the dark and anguished places in the human
heart.
Franco, who recently starred in both Oz The Great and
Powerful and Spring Breakers, will screen his directorial effort As I Lay
Dying, based on the William Faulkner tome, at the Cannes Film Festival.
Hanna Weg, who provides the screenplay to The Garden of Last
Days, will also produce alongside Gerard Butler, Danielle Robinson and Alan
Siegel.
