Joe Wright of 'Anna Karenina' To Direct Neil Gaiman's 'The Ocean at the End of the Lane'
by Shannon KeirnanProlific and talented author Neil Gaiman already has a stellar team on board to adapt his upcoming novel, The Ocean at the End of the Lane.
Though the fantasy hasn’t even hit bookstores (look for it in June), director Joe Wright has already signed on to bring it to the big screen.
Wright most recently directed Oscar-winning (costume design) “Anna Karenina,” but he is also known for his love of directing Keira Knightley within “Pride and Prejudice,” and “Atonement.”
Focus Features as well as Tom Hanks’ Playtone have acquired the rights to Gaiman’s Ocean. Gaiman’s stories have been popular Hollywood options, notably family-friendly “Stardust” and “Coraline” drawing in large audiences. Gaiman also wrote the screenplay for the moderately viewed “Beowulf.”
The synopsis of The Ocean at the End of the Lane is intriguing:
"It began for our narrator forty years ago when the family lodger stole their car and committed suicide in it, stirring up ancient powers best left undisturbed. Dark creatures from beyond the world are on the loose, and it will take everything our narrator has just to stay alive: there is primal horror here, and menace unleashed — within his family and from the forces that have gathered to destroy it.
“His only defense is three women, on a farm at the end of the lane. The youngest of them claims that her duck pond is an ocean. The oldest can remember the Big Bang.”
The novel claims to be “a fable that reshapes modern fantasy: moving, terrifying, and elegiac—as pure as a dream, as delicate as a butterfly’s wing, as dangerous as a knife in the dark.”
What do you think about the concept of the film? And, of course... which of the three women will Keira Knightley play?