Students switching from home-schooling to the treacherous waters of high school can be rich source fodder for drama. And that's what Asa Butterfield and Alex Wolff will be hoping for as they sign up to star in House Of Tomorrow.
Peter Livolsi is making his directorial debut with the film, which adapts Peter Bognanni's novel. House Of Tomorrow is set in Iowa, not in the world of tomorrow, but in 2011. In Minnesota, a teenage boy (Butterfield) has spent years living in a geodesic dome with his eccentric grandmother, who has done all in her power to educate him in the life, works and thoughts of futurist, architect and inventor R. Buckminster fuller. But when she suffers a stroke, he's forced to leave the sanctuary of the dome and learn to deal with a regular high school. He forms a friendship with Wolff's character, and together they figure out how to meet girls, become punk gods and just survive the school world.
Livolsi has the likes of Ellen Burstyn, Nick Offerman, Maude Apatow and Michaela Watkins in the cast, and he's already shooting the movie in Minnesota. “Peter Bognanni’s book is full of great characters, not the least of which is Buckminster Fuller, a man whose ideas are so spectacular they seem like fiction,” Livolsi tells Variety. “He did things his own way just like the punk heroes the boys in our story aspire to become.”
Butterfield will be back on our screens in The Space Between Us (out next February 10), in which he plays another lad dealing with an unusual home life before confronting the world; except in that one he was raised on Mars and falls for a young woman on Earth. Wolff has a key role in Peter Berg's Boston bombing aftermath drama Patriots Day, which will be released here on January 27.