Tarak Ben Ammar’s Eagle Pictures and “Green Book” director Peter Farrelly are teaming up on the film adaptation of French author Guillaume Musso’s bestselling novel “Seras-tu là,” Variety has learned.
“Seras-tu là” revolves around Elliott, a 60-year old widowed and renowned surgeon who lives in San Francisco and has a daughter, Angie. Although he leads a successful life, he never totally recovered from the death of his beloved wife 30 years prior. One day, he meets a man who gives him the opportunity to travel back in time. Elliott embarks on a journey to change his wife’s fate and do things differently, traveling back and forth between 2006 and 1976.
Ben Ammar has optioned the 2006 book’s English-language audiovisual rights for a duration of four years. Farrelly will be involved as co-writer and director. Ben Ammar will be producing the film with Mark Burg, with whom he produced “American Skin” and recently launched the vehicle T&M Finance.
It’s a passion project for Farrelly, who had been trying to option the rights to the book for years. The filmmaker, who’s best known for the cult comedies “There’s Something About Mary” and “Dumb and Dumber,” discovered the book after seeing the South Korean movie on a plane and fell in love with the story, which weaves romance and fantasy, said a source close to the project. Farrelly is currently filming “The Greatest Beer Run Ever” with Zac Efron and Russell Crowe for Apple.
The novel was previously adapted in South Korea with the 2016 film “Will You Be There?,” directed by Hong Ji-Young and starring Kim Yoon-Seok and Byun Yo-Han.
Eagle Pictures, Italy’s leading distributor, is also an investor in Gary Barber and Lantern Entertainment’s Spyglass Media Group (along with Cineworld), and has been increasingly involved in production.
One of France’s most popular novelists, Musso is also the author of “La jeune fille et la nuit,” whose series adaptation “The Reunion” is currently shooting in the South of France with Bill Eagles (“Beautiful Creatures,” “12 Monkeys”) directing and Ioan Gruffudd (“Fantastic Four”), Ivanna Sakhno (“Pacific Rim Uprising”) and Grégory Fitoussi (“Spiral”) starring. The ambitious show is produced by Sydney Gallonde’s Make It Happen with MGM International TV Productions and public broadcaster France Televisions. “La jeune fille et la nuit,” published by Calmann-Lévy in 2018, has sold more than two million copies worldwide in more than 35 languages.
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