Filmmaker Sam Mendes is interested in switching things up. Having gotten his feature career started with the Best Picture-winning suburban drama AMERICAN BEAUTY, he has gone on to direct a gangster film (ROAD TO PERDITION), a war movie (JARHEAD), more drama (REVOLUTIONARY ROAD), comedy (AWAY WE GO), and then surprised a lot of people when he took the helm of a blockbuster action movie – resulting in one of my favorite James Bond films, SKYFALL. Mendes kind of whiffed it with his second Bond film, SPECTRE, but now he's ready to move on from Bond and try something else… and "something else" this time may mean horror.
Mendes is currently in talks with Sony Pictures to develop an adaptation of the Emil Ferris graphic novel MY FAVORITE THING IS MONSTERS. Mendes would produce the adaptation through his Neal Street banner, alongside Amasia Entertainment's Bradley Gallo and Michael Helfant, and potentially direct the film.
The graphic novel is
set against the tumultuous political backdrop of late ’60s Chicago, and is the fictional graphic diary of 10-year-old Karen Reyes. It is infused with B-movie horror and pulp monster magazine iconography. Karen tries to solve the murder of her enigmatic upstairs neighbor, Anka Silverberg, a holocaust survivor, while the interconnected stories of those around her unfold. Karen’s investigation takes us back to Anka’s life in Nazi Germany, where the reader discovers how the personal, the political, the past, and the present converge. Present throughout are monsters, real and imagined.
The mixture of B-movie horror imagery and an investigation of real world tragedy sounds like an odd and interesting one. I imagine something like this could be quite difficult to adapt for the screen, but since I haven't read the graphic novel I couldn't say for sure. It's certainly an intriguing project, and I would like to see some Mendes-directed monsters.
Mendes does have some horror on his filmography already – he was an executive producer on the Showtime series Penny Dreadful.
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