After months of back and forth following the departure of David O’Russell over who would direct the adaptation of Seth Grahame Smith’s Pride And Prejudice And Zombies, it seems things are now settled. Craig Gillespie (Lars & the Real Girl, Fright Night) will helm, but it will still be based on the screenplay O’Russell put together while he was one the project.
It’s perhaps not surprising they’ve kept the script, as for a while it was said to be the one thing keeping momentum going on the project while various directors and cast members came and went. Gillespie told EW, “We have a really great script that were just going to do a polish on and then get going, really . David Russell wrote the script off the book, and it has such a great mix of humor and horror. I just love being able to juggle those two aspects.”
In case you don’t know, the novel takes the majority of Jane Austen’s classic prose and then adds in a zombie uprising to give a bit of spice to the period drama of befrocked love.
And it seems the script was what sold the film to Gillespie, as he says “I was still finishing up Fright Night, but in the meantime I called my agent and said, I want to see that script. He said, Im not sure wed be able to figure out the timing. But I read the first 30 pages and said, I want to do this. Its just such a great combination between classic literature Jane Austen, and meshing it with zombies. The challenge of meshing those two genres is really exciting to me.”
The director adds, “There’s a lot of action in this. There are a lot of big set pieces in this film, which is exciting. Basically, as I said to the studio, at the core it’s a love story between Elizabeth and Darcy. If that’s not working, and we’re not rooting for those two get together through all this craziness, the movie is not going to work. That’s key to me, to have this great emotional story going on, and all this craziness. I love the propriety of the Jane Austen novels, which you want to keep. The language, what’s appropriate and not appropriate. The customs, and the hierarchy. They had very witty dialogue with a lot of undertones to it. You need the juxtoposition. There’s going to be a strong gothic undertone, which ties the two genres together. It’s more in the world of [Tim Burton’s 1999] Sleepy Hollow, where it’s somewhat stylized. We have that creative license because of the zombies. I’ll certainly do my homework and explore genres to see what might work, but it’s going to have that strong gothic sense, I think.”
As to who will play the main roles, that’s still completely up in the air.