EXCLUSIVE: Days before his film Glassland competes in the World Cinema Dramatic Competition at Sundance, Gerard Barrett has lined up his next job. He has been set by Denver & Delilah Films and Foundation Features to write and direct a drama based on the Susannah Cahalan’s best selling memoir Brain on Fire: My Month of Madness. Dakota Fanning is set to star as Cahalan in a drama that details a young woman’s terrifying descent into insanity.
Charlize Theron, Beth Kono, and A.J. Dix will produce for Denver & Delilah. Rob Merilees of Foundation Features will produce and finance. Barrett will be co-producer. The Canadian-Irish co-production will shoot in May, in Vancouver and New York. WME Global is representing worldwide rights.
The Irish filmmaker made his debut on Pilgrim Hill, a low budget study of a farmer battling isolation and loneliness that premiered at the Irish Galway Film Fleadh. Glassland stars Jack Reynor as a Dublin cab driver who barely makes ends meet and lives with an alcoholic mother (Toni Collette) who is drinking herself to death. Her best hope is a pricey rehab clinic and the driver must return to crime to fund it.
Denver & Delilah most recently completed Dark Places, the Gilles Paquet-Brenner-directed drama based on the novel by Gone Girl’s Gillian Flynn, and starring Chloe Moretz and Theron. A24 releases this summer. Merilees’ Foundation is producing and financing season three of the prime time police procedural Motive.
Mike Fleming
