A flurry of casting announcements last autumn saw Russell Crowe, Amanda Seyfried and Aaron Paul signing up for Gabriele Muccino's ensemble drama Fathers And Daughters. After a quieter couple of months, the film now has some new additions. Quvenzhane Wallis, Diane Kruger and Octavia Spencer will all be making appearances.
The script, written by Brad Desch, follows a parental relationship across 25 troubled years, with Crowe playing a novelist and widower struggling with mental illness as he raises his five year-old daughter. The story also shows the daughter as an adult (Seyfried) working through the problems rooted in her difficult childhood. Paul, not for the first time (following HBO drama Big Love), is playing Seyfried's boyfriend.
Kruger has signed on to play Crowe's estranged sister-in-law, while the rest of the new cast belong to the psychiatric clinic where Seyfried's character is a child counsellor. Spencer is the clinic's "spirited" head, while Beasts Of The Southern Wild's Wallis (who has just finished working on the Annie remake) is a patient who hasn't spoken for a year following her mother's murder.
Fathers And Daughters is currently in pre-production in Pittsburgh, and will shortly be the subject of some wheeling and dealing at the European Film Market in Berlin.