After chronicling the slow breakdown of a marriage in Blue Valentine and the consequences of crime, choices, family and frustration in The Place Beyond The Pines, you might be forgiven for thinking Derek Cianfrance could do with tackling something light and funny for a future project. He, however, does not agree, signing on to handle The Light Between Oceans for DreamWorks.
As announced by the company, Cianfrance will adapt and direct the film based on M.L. Steadman’s novel. Oceans follows Tom Sherbourne, a lighthouse keeper on Janus Rock, a tiny island a half-day’s boat journey from the coast of Western Australia. When a baby washes up in a rowboat along with a dead body, he and his young wife Isabel decide to raise the child as their own. The child seems like a gift from God, and the couple’s reasoning for keeping her seduces the reader into entering the waters of treacherous morality even as Tom – whose moral code withstood the horrors of World War I – begins to waver.
With David Heyman’s Heyday Films producing, we expect Cianfrance to reach out to regular collaborator Ryan Gosling, who may attempt to play the lighthouse keeper, the baby and the corpse in his latest effort to stretch his acting range.
Right now, however, Cianfrance is directing Metalhead, the story of a former heavy metal drummer who blows his eardrums out and must adapt to a world of silence. It’s described as “an introspective journey into the vortex of our senses, tinkering with cinema's boundaries,” which seems right in his wheelhouse.