Jonathan Demme To Film Eggers's Zeitoun
From the New York Times : A film version of a book about a man’s true-life experiences in post-Katrina New Orleans would seem sufficiently pregnant with artistic possibility. Still, Jonathan Demme plans to take his adaption of Zeitoun, the best-selling Dave Eggers work, one step further by making it as an animated feature.
On Wednesday, Mr. Demme (whose films include The Silence of the Lambs and Rachel Getting Married) said that he had acquired the film rights to “Zeitoun,” whose cover illustration by Rachell Sumpter had inspired him to make it into a cartoon.
‘I was staring at the book,’ Mr. Demme said in a telephone interview, ‘and there’s this wonderful line drawing on the cover, the character of Zeitoun in his canoe, paddling through a submerged neighborhood. And I suddenly imagined, What if we could do an animated film and visualize the experiences of the Zeitoun family and all of New Orleans?’
The book by Mr. Eggers (a co-author of the screenplay for Where the Wild Things Are) tells the story of Abdulrahman Zeitoun, a Syrian-American man who remained in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina to protect his home and business, and paddled its flooded streets in a canoe, offering his help to other flood victims.
Hamish Hamilton will publish Zeitoun in the UK in March 2010.