Cate Blanchett has proved time and again that she knows what she’s doing on the acting front. Now she’s aiming to prove she has what it takes on the other side of the camera, setting up her directorial debut. Blanchett will tackle an adaptation of Herman Koch’s novel** The Dinner.
Oren Moverman, who wrote and directed The Messenger and Rampart, is on hand to adapt Koch’s book. The novel is set on a summer's evening in Amsterdam, where two couples meet at a fashionable restaurant for dinner. Between mouthfuls of food and over the polite scrapings of cutlery, the conversation remains a gentle hum of polite discourse – the banality of work, the triviality of the holidays. But behind the empty words, terrible things need to be said, and with every forced smile and every new course, the knives are being sharpened.
Each couple has a 15-year-old son. The two boys are united by their accountability for a single horrific act; an act that has triggered a police investigation and shattered the comfortable, insulated worlds of their families. As the dinner reaches its culinary climax, the conversation finally touches on their children. As civility and friendship disintegrate, each couple show just how far they are prepared to go to protect those they love...
While this will mark Blanchett’s first time directing, she’s been directing plays for a few years now, and is still weighing whether she’ll also take one of the leads in the new movie.
She’ll be back on screens in Woody Allen’s Blue Jasmine, which is out on September 27. Blanchett’s also currently at work on Cinderella, set for release next year.