Getty Images
Netflix is teaming with Ridley Scott’s Scott Free Productions to adapt Susanna Jones’ novel THE EARTHQUAKE BIRD with actors Alicia Vikander and Riley Keough in talks to star in the film which Wash Westmoreland (Still Alice) has adapted to direct.
Set in Tokyo, the female-driven noir thriller tells the story of a young female expat suspected of murder after her friend goes missing in the wake of a tumultuous love triangle with a handsome local photographer.
Kevin Walsh and Michael Pruss will produce for Scott Free along with Ann Ruark, and Twenty First City’s Georgina Pope. Ridley Scott will exec. produce. Plans are to start filming in Tokyo and on Sado Island starting in May.
Amazon Studios had originally been involved with adapting Jones’ novel, which won the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize and the Crime Writers’ Association New Blood Dagger Award for newly-published authors.
Westmoreland’s most recent film Colette, starring Keira Knightley, premiered at the Sundance Film Festival where it was picked up by Bleecker Street and 30West for distribution after favorable reviews. Before that, Westmoreland worked with the late Richard Glatzer on the drama Still Alice, for which Julianne Moore received the Oscar for her performance. Before that, Westmoreland co-wrote and co-directed the Sundance prize-winning Quinceañera with Glatzer.
Represented by UTA, Actors in Scandinavia and Tavistock Wood Management, the Oscar-winning Vikander can currently be seen in Warner Bros. and MGM’s Tomb Raider, and she’s been attached to The Imitation Game director Morten Tyldum’s The Marsh King’s Daughter at Black Bear.
Keough appeared in the Steven Soderbergh heist comedy Logan Lucky and Trey Edward Shults’ thriller It Comes at Night, last year, and she was the star of the STARZ drama series The Girlfriend Experience, based on an earlier Soderbergh film. In 2016, Keough appeared in the indies Lovesong and American Honey, and she wss part of the ensemble cast for George Miller’s Oscar-winning Mad Max: Fury Road in 2015. The trailer for her upcoming drama Under the Silver Lake with Andrew Garfield just premiered yesterday. She is represented by WME and Thirty Three Management.
Deadline initially reported on Netflix’s involvement and the actors being in talks.
Edward Douglas | East Coast Editor
