Deadline has learned that SELMA director Ava DuVernay is being wooed by Disney and Amblin to helm two different features. According to the site, the Mouse House has offered her A WRINKLE IN TIME, a big screen adaptation of the Madeleine L’Engle fantasy novel of the same name, and she's also in negotiations with Steven Spielberg's production company to direct INTELLIGENT LIFE, a sci-fi thriller penned by Colin Trevorrow and his JURASSIC WORLD co-writer Derek Connolly.
A WRINKLE IN TIME, for those of you who didn't read the Newbery Medal-winning book in elementary school, "revolves around a young girl whose father, a government scientist, has gone missing after working on a mysterious project called a tesseract, which involves being transported to a fifth dimension with mysterious inhabited planets." If DuVernay does take the job, she'll be directing from a script by FROZEN director and co-writer Jennifer Lee.
INTELLIGENT LIFE, meanwhile, is a new take on an earlier Trevorrow-Connolly project titled THE AMBASADOR, and is "about a UN worker in a department designed to represent mankind if there was ever contact with aliens, who falls for a mystery woman who turns out to be an alien." It's also being reported that 12 YEARS A SLAVE's Lupita Nyong'o is in talks to play the woman. Last year the plan was for Trevorrow to direct INTELLIGENT LIFE himself, however he's currently doing post-production work on his Naomi Watts-led drama THE BOOK OF HENRY.
Although DuVernay has been a little picky about her SELMA follow-up (last summer she passed on directing BLACK PANTHER for Marvel), it's possible she could end up behind the camera for both A WRINKLE IN TIME and INTELLIGENT LIFE, however there's no word on which one is more likely to head into production first. Which project would you rather see the filmmaker commit to?
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