Cate Blanchett has directed several stage productions – indeed she’s co-artistic director of the Sydney Theater Company, alongside her husband, playwright Andrew Upton – and now she’s turning her directing skill to cinema, as Deadline reports she’s set to helms an adaptation of Herman Koch’s novel The Dinner. Oren Moverman (The Messenger, Rampart) is writing the adapted screenplay.
The novel’s official description says, ‘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.’
It sounds rather small but intense. She may also star in the movie, but hasn’t decided on that yet.