Listen Up Philip director Alex Ross Perry generated quite a few overhead cartoon question marks last week when he announced that he’d pen the script for a live-action Winnie-The-Pooh movie. As an established talent in the indie-film circuit known primarily for acerbic, emotionally nuanced comedies, Pooh and Co. seemed like an odd fit for Perry. Today, however, brings the announcement of a new Perry project that sounds a little more well-suited to the director.
Variety reported today that Perry has optioned the rights to write and direct an adaptation of Don DeLillo’s dense, complex novel The Names. Like so many of DeLillo’s novels, it’s both difficult to describe and better in practice than theory, but here goes: Structured as a collection of character sketches, the book follows an investigation into a string of murders taking place in 1979 Athens. Because this is Don DeLillo we’re talking about, there’s also a lot of stuff about linguistics and geopolitical terrorism in there, too.
The Names is just the latest addition to Perry’s always-expanding docket, alongside the aforementioned script for a Hundred Acre Woods adventure, and his new feature Queen Of Earth, which debuted to a strong reception at the Berlinale earlier this year and will continue to globetrot around major festivals until a full release later this year. For any other director, that could be an awfully full plate, but the man knows what he’s doing. The more the Perry-er!
There couldn’t be a better choice than Perry, either. Beyond the fact that its two main characters were career novelists, Listen Up Philip gave off a distinct lit-nerd vibe through its perfectly realized mockup covers for the faux-novels written by Jonathan Pryce’s Ike Zimmerman. There’s no way that anyone other than a devout student of modern literature cooked up Madness & Women, Ample Profanity, and Audit. Add to that Perry’s winningly enthused reaction on Twitter—which has, strangely, been deleted, but read “Don DeLillo is god-level, on the Mount Rushmore of post war American authors so this should be fun.”—and the famously unadaptable DeLillo starts to look a little more adaptable. David Cronenberg proved it could be done in 2012’s Cosmopolis, the first-ever attempt at wrestling DeLillo’s work into a shape befitting the silver screen. Now, it’s time for Perry to prove that it can be done well. (Sorry, Cronenberg. Cosmopolis was good, but not DeLillo-good.)