Jake Gyllenhaal, Denis Villeneuve to Reunite for Crime Drama ‘The Son’
Jake Gyllenhaal’s Nine Stories and Bold Films are bringing Jo Nesbo’s crime novel “The Son” to the big screen. “Sicario” director Denis Villeneuve is attached to helm the drama.
Producers are Nine Stories’ Gyllenhaal and Riva Marker, and Bold’s Michel Litvak. Bold’s Gary Michael Walters will executive produce with Nesbo and Niclas Salomonsson.
“The Son” marks the third collaboration for Gyllenhaal and Villeneuve, who previously teamed on “Enemy” and “Prisoners.”
Nesbo’s books have sold more than 30 million copies and been translated into 50 languages. His crime novel “The Snowman” was adapted into a film by Tomas Alfredson for Working Title.
“‘The Son’ is our first development project with Jake and Riva and epitomizes the original, elevated work with top filmmakers that is the raison d’etre for our Nine Stories relationship,” said Bold’s Litvak.
“The Son” follows a once-gifted 15-year-old and promising wrestler, whose life spirals out of control when his cop father commits suicide. He winds up in prison, nurtured by an uninterrupted supply of heroin from a seedy chaplain on the inside. When he learns long-hidden truths about his father’s unexpected death, he makes a brilliant escape and begins hunting down the people responsible for his wrongful sentence.
Nine Stories, which has a first-look and overhead deal with Bold Films, recently completed principal photography on its first feature film, David Gordon Green’s “Stronger,” starring Gyllenhaal as working-class Boston man Jeff Bauman, who lost his legs in the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing.
Already in development at Nine Stories is Jack Hitt’s “This American Life” account of Lee Yopp, a former-football-coach-turned-theater-director, who was hired by the U.S. army to stage an annual music pageant on Fort Bragg.
Antoine Fuqua’s cartel drama “The Man Who Made It Snow,” based on David Mermelstein’s bestselling autobiography, is also in development. Gyllenhaal is set to star as Max Mermelstein, a Jewish hotel engineer who transformed Pablo Escobar’s Medellin Cartel from a small mom-and-pop drug organization into a billion-dollar enterprise.
Gyllenhaal is represented by WME and Carlos Goodman of Bloom Hergott. Villeneuve is represented by CAA. Nesbo is represented by RWSG, The Salomonsson Agency and Keith Fleer.
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