He may be best known as a novelist responsible for gritty crime tales, but Dennis Lehane has also established himself as a screenwriter, working on the likes of The Wire and Boardwalk Empire on the small screen and adapting his short story Animal Rescue for cinemas. He’s also been dabbling in adapting other writers’ novels and Sony wants him to tackle a new challenge: the script for its remake of **A Prophet.
The studio announced back in June that it, along with Fast & Furious franchise producer Neal Moritz, had bagged the rights to remake Jacques Audiard’s stunning film. The deservedly acclaimed, Oscar-nominated 2010 original saw Tahar Rahim as Malik El Djebena, an illiterate French-Arab teen sent down for six years and initiated into the prison’s criminal underworld. A fast learner, he soon starts to plot his rapid rise through the violent and brutal inmate hierarchy to become a formidable player.
There’s no exact details on how the new film will shift the story – presumably with Lehane on script duty, it’ll move to somewhere in the States – or whether it can match up to the sterling Audiard version. Lehane's involvement, at least, gives crime genre fans something to anticipate.