Current doing the rounds for his George Clooney Oscar-vehicle The Descendants, director Alexander Payne has revealed to Empire that he will next adapt the Daniel Clowes comic Wilson to the screen. The news has been floating around for a while, but this is confirmation that it will be his next project after Nebraska.
The Sideways director is reportedly looking for a an actor (surely Paul Giamatti?) to play the titular Wilson, and that Clowes will be adapting his own book.
The official synopsis from the back of the graphic novel is: Meet Wilson, an opinionated middle-aged loner who loves his dog and quite possibly no one else. In an ongoing quest to find human connection, he badgers friend and stranger alike into a series of onesided conversations, punctuating his own lofty discursions with a brutally honest, self-negating sense of humor. After his father dies, Wilson, now irrevocably alone, sets out to find his ex-wife with the hope of rekindling their long-dead relationship, and discovers he has a teenage daughter, born after the marriage ended and given up for adoption.Wilson eventually forces all three to reconnect as a family—a doomed mission that will surely, inevitably backfire.
In the first all-new graphic novel from one of the leading cartoonists of our time, Daniel Clowes creates a thoroughly engaging, complex, and fascinating portrait of the modern egoist—outspoken and oblivious to the world around him.Working in a single-page-gag format and drawing in a spectrumof styles, the cartoonist of GhostWorld, Ice Haven, and David Boring gives us his funniest and most deeply affecting novel to date.
Clowes’ Ghost World was previously adapted by Terry Zwigoff and starred Steve Buscemi, Thora Birch and Scarlett Johansson.
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