Following last year's acclaimed indie drama Snow Angels, author Stewart O'Nan is staring at a number of other potential film adaptations.
By FilmStew Staff, FilmStew.com
When author Stewart O'Nan first envisioned the film version of his 1999 novel A Prayer for the Dying, about the trials and tribulations of a Civil War veteran in the diphtheria infected town of Friendship, Wisconsin, he had a wish list of three actors for the title role of Jacob Hansen. Now, nearly a decade later, he's thrilled that one of those three has decided to come on board.
"The most exciting news is that Ewan McGregor has attached himself to the script of A Prayer for the Dying" O'Nan tells the Farmington Valley News. "Amazing, since he, along with Ed Norton and Daniel Day-Lewis, was on my wish list of actors to play Jacob."
Though O'Nan has not been so lucky with his screenplay about Edgar Allen Poe, titled Poe, when you're an acclaimed author you can always resort to publishing the manuscript in book form. Which is exactly what the O'Nan did earlier this year, with a foreword by Roger Corman. (Of the screenplay, Corman wrote: 'A page-turner that delivers a tale as full of mystery and imagination as Poe's famous stories...Stewart O'Nan's life of Poe would make a great movie: erotic, violent, darkly humorous, suspenseful, and shocking.')
Another unnamed British filmmaker is in pre-production on a movie version of O'Nan's 2003 tome The Night Country, about the ghosts of four victims of a drunk driving accident. And the busy author can also take comfort in the pleasures of last year's adaptation of The Snow Angels by writer-director David Gordon Green into a critically acclaimed movie starring Kate Beckinsale.
"I've seen the film four times now, and each time I see it, I find something more to like," O'Nan says. "So I feel lucky. You rarely get a second chance when adapting a book for the screen, and he [Green] nailed it on the first try."
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