Focus on the 'Road'


Phoenix, Ruffalo to star in first film under new banner

By MICHAEL FLEMING

Focus Features has set Joaquin Phoenix and Mark Ruffalo to star for director Terry George in "Reservation Road," an adaptation of the John Burnham Schwartz novel. The drama will shoot this fall as the first project under Focus' partnership with book publisher Random House.

Phoenix and Ruffalo will play fathers on opposite sides of a hit-and-run: The Ruffalo character kills Phoenix's son and flees. As the grieving father seeks revenge, the tragedy wears on both men in unexpected ways. Schwartz wrote the screenplay, and George polished it.

Since Focus and Random House are each paying half of the production and development costs of a film that will require less than $20 million, "Reservation Road" fits the model hatched by Focus CEO James Schamus and Random House Films president Peter Gethers last year.

Still, the deal is something of a surprise since they didn't develop the project themselves, and those they do have in development, like Yasmina Khadra's "The Attack," Bob Drogin's "Curveball" and Dean Koontz's "The Husband," are based on more recently published books.

"We hadn't expected to have a film ready this quickly, but Nick Wechsler put the entire 'Reservation Road' package together and brought it to Focus and then us, because it was published by Random House's Knopf in 1998," Gethers said. "It fit the spirit of what makes this arrangement so exciting ... We think this will be a very literate and intelligent movie, and that Vintage is going to sell quite a few books if it does well."

Gethers said RH's financing commitment puts the deal beyond other imprints that try to tie down film rights on books they publish but have no financing. Not every author will adapt their novels as Schwartz did, but the book writers will have more input than is normal in films, Gethers said.

Koontz made his movie deal partly because he gets a say in who writes and directs it, and though he's still researching and writing a book that traces the advent of the war in Iraq, "Curveball" author Drogin has met and is sharing research with a screenwriter Gethers wouldn't name. The point is to accelerate the development process.

Wechsler will produce "Reservation Road" while Dean Levitt and Gina Resnick exec produce. Phoenix just wrapped the James Gray-directed drama "We Own the Night," while Ruffalo has three pics in the can: "All the King's Men," "Zodiac" and "Margaret."

Source: Variety

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