The big screen adaptation of Paul Abbott’s miniseries State** Of play** finally has a director – it’s The Last King Of Scotland’s Kevin Macdonald. He’s been working on a new draft of the condensed script with screenwriter Matthew Carnahan (Joe’s brother, who’s recently worked on The Kingdom, White Jazz, and the Robert Redford / Meryl Streep / Tom Cruise drama Lions For Lambs) for Brad Pitt’s company Plan B.
Pitt is also going to star in the film, about the relationship between politics and the press, which follows a team of journalists who delve into the case of a congressman’s mistress being killed. Brad will fill the role played in the series by John Simm (which coincidentally also starred Macdonald’s own co-leading man from Scotland, James McAvoy), a reporter who was once close friends with the politician who is now under scrutiny.
Traffic (also a top UK / Euro miniseries adapted by Hollywood) has set the bar for this sort of thing very high, but given the quality of the material here, and the fact that it has the blessing of Abbott, who is an executive producer on the film, we’re finding it hard to think how this could miss. It’ll be Macdonald’s second fiction film after Scotland, but he’s got three documentaries under his belt too (One Day In September, Touching The Void and the soon to be released My Enemy’s Enemy), which makes him an excellent choice for a script dealing with the relationship between the truth and what the public are told.
There’s been no other casting announcements made yet, but expect the ball to start rolling very soon – the toughest decision of which is who to cast as the newspaper’s Editor In Chief, which Bill Nighy nailed so perfectly in the original.