Despite her young age, turning just twenty-seven in a few days’ time, Scarlett Johansson already has a slew of major roles in her credits, along with a long list of awards and nominations to her name, including a BAFTA for her part in Lost in Translation, and four Golden Globe nominations.
Johansson is now set to make her feature directorial debut, The Playlist report, in an adaptation of Truman Capote’s Summer Crossing, an early Capote novel that was published for the first time posthumously in 2005, having been set aside after a decade of adjustments following its conception in 1943.
“Taking place over the course of a hot summer in 1945 New York City, the story centers on the 17 year old Grady, from a well-to-do family living on Fifth Avenue, who enters a torrid affair with a parking attendant, winds up marrying him, and becomes pregnant”
Though I’ve not read any of Capote’s work, the name of course is an incredibly well recognised one, and many of his works have been adapted for film and TV alike, including Breakfast at Tiffany’s and In Cold Blood. The man’s life, itself, was also turned into the Oscar-winning film, Capote, in which Philip Seymour Hoffman starred as the eponymous writer, for which he earned himself the Best Actor Academy Award.
Johansson is not entirely new to the directing game, having written and directed the short film, These Vagabond Shoes, starring Kevin Bacon, which was put on the DVD for New York, I Love You (in the States, at least, but I’m not sure about the UK copy).
The script is being written by Tristin Skyler, who’s adapting Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar, in which Julia Stiles will star, so though it’s still early days for the project yet, it’s good to know that it’s already moving in the right direction. Having worked with some of the biggest directors in the industry, including Woody Allen, Christopher Nolan, Michael Bay, Cameron Crowe, Brian De Palma, and Sofia Coppola, to name just a few, it’s definitely going to be interesting to see what kind of a director Johansson will be. I’m betting a good one.
We’ll next be seeing the actress opposite Matt Damon in Cameron Crowe’s We Bought A Zoo, before returning to star alongside her Iron Man 2 co-stars in Joss Whedon’s highly anticipated The Avengers, due out on 27th April next year.
