Ever since Philip Roth’s brilliant American Pastoral won the Pulitzer Prize, there’s been talk of making it into a movie. Everyone from Fisher Stevens to Philip Noyce have been attached to direct at one time or another, but all have dropped out before is went before the camera.
Last year Ewan McGregor, Dakota Fanning and Jennifer Connelly came onboard to star, and now it turns out Ewan won’t just be in front of the camera, he’ll be directing too. It’s certainly a brave more to make for his debut helming debut, as it’s an acclaimed and complex book he’s working from.
Ewan comments in Variety, “It’s a great privilege to be working with Lakeshore on Phillip Roth’s astounding novel American Pastoral. I’ve wanted to direct for years and wanted to wait until I found a story that I ‘had’ to tell and in this script I knew I had found that story.”
American Pastoral is about Swede Levov (McGregor), a legendary high school athlete who grows up to marry a former beauty queen and inherits his father’s business. However his seemingly perfect life is shattered when his daughter (Fanning) rebels by becoming a revolutionary and committing a savage act of political terrorism during the Vietnam War.
The movie will shoot in September in Pittsburgh
The decades-long journey to get Philip Roth’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel American Pastoral onto the big screen finally looks like it might be coming to fruition, with Philip Noyce in place to direct and Ewan McGregor recently signing on to star.