EXCLUSIVE: Director Martin Scorsese has committed to his next film, and he’s got Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence as his leads. They’re eyeing a January start for an adaptation of the ghost story novel What Happens at Night. Deadline hears that Apple Original Films is negotiating to finance and produce with Studiocanal, which has developed the script.
This comes as the DiCaprio-starring One Battle After Another is set to bow next weekend, amidst rapturous buzz and reviews for the Paul Thomas Anderson-directed film. Apple makes a lot of sense as the landing place for the new film. The studio was behind the Scorsese-directed DiCaprio-starrer Killers of the Flower Moon, and has first-look deals with Scorsese’s Sikelia and DiCaprio’s Appian Way banners.
Patrick Marber penned the script to What Happens at Night after Studiocanal acquired rights to the Peter Cameron novel in the spring of 2023. At the time, Scorsese was only meant to produce the adaptation as he percolated other possible follow-ups to Killers of the Flower Moon.
DiCaprio had also been weighing several projects including Damien Chazelle’s Evel Knievel biopic but ultimately those projects went away and the pieces fell into place where the film has three Oscar winners above the line here, including Lawrence.
The dream-like story follows a married American couple who travel to a small, snowy European town to adopt a baby. They check into a cavernous, largely deserted hotel where they encounter an enigmatic cast of characters including a flamboyant chanteuse, a depraved businessman and a charismatic faith healer. Nothing is quite as it seems in this strange, frozen world. As the couple struggle to claim their baby, the less they seem to know about themselves and the life they’ve built together. Scorsese and DiCaprio tackled this kind of sleight-of-hand material in their hit adaptation of the Dennis Lehane novel Shutter Island.
Lawrence was most recently seen in Die, My Love opposite Robert Pattinson, with Lynne Ramsay directing. The film premiered at Cannes, where Mubi acquired it with plans for a November release.
Stay tuned as the distribution deal gets wrapped up, and Scorsese casts up those other eccentric character roles.
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