Director Daniel Barnz has had a really interesting career since his Sundance favorite Phoebe in Wonderland, starring Elle Fanning, debuted at the festival four-and-a-half years ago. That led to him adapting the young adult fantasy novel Beastly, a modern-day take on “Beauty and the Beast,” and on Friday, September 28, his latest movie Won’t Back Down, starring Viola Davis and Maggie Gyllenhaal, brings Barnz further into reality with its look at a mother and teacher trying to fix a broken elementary school.
ComingSoon.net sat down with Barnz to speak about the latter earlier today and we learned that he’s currently working on an adaptation of Héctor Tobar’s novel The Barbarian Nurseries, again working with Won’t Back Down producer Mark Johnson (“The Chronicles of Narnia”).
Written by L.A. Times columnist Héctor Tobar and published in late 2011, it’s a look at modern-day Southern California life through the eyes of mixed-race couple Maureen and Scott Torres-Thompson. Considered by some as a modern-day West Coast take on Tom Wolfe’s “Bonfire of the Vanities,” the novel purports to show Los Angeles in a different way than has been seen in movies, which should make for a very interesting movie indeed.
“It’s a great natural step from this one because like ‘Won’t Back Down,’ it’s also essentially a human drama that has some political overtones and so I’m very drawn to those kinds of films,”, Barnz told us during the interview.
Look for that full interview as well as interviews with Barz’s cast sometime next week before the release of Won’t Back Down on Friday, September 28.
