Although his name has been connected to the project for some time, Ben Affleck officially confirmed today with MTV that his next directing project will be another adaptation of a book by Dennis Lehane (Gone Baby Gone). His plans for the project, Live By Night, are the reason he was forced to drop out of the upcoming Focus, which he was planning to star in opposite Kristen Stewart.
“Basically, I’m doing this movie called ‘Live By Night,'” Affleck tells the site. “and I’m trying to meet this schedule in order to do it and meet the back end so I can have it released at the right time.”
Published last fall, Live By Night is officially described as follows:
Boston, 1926. The ’20s are roaring. Liquor is flowing, bullets are flying, and one man sets out to make his mark on the world.
Prohibition has given rise to an endless network of underground distilleries, speakeasies, gangsters, and corrupt cops. Joe Coughlin, the youngest son of a prominent Boston police captain, has long since turned his back on his strict and proper upbringing. Now having graduated from a childhood of petty theft to a career in the pay of the city’s most fearsome mobsters, Joe enjoys the spoils, thrills, and notoriety of being an outlaw.
But life on the dark side carries a heavy price. In a time when ruthless men of ambition, armed with cash, illegal booze, and guns, battle for control, no oneneither family nor friend, enemy nor lovercan be trusted. Beyond money and power, even the threat of prison, one fate seems most likely for men like Joe: an early death. But until that day, he and his friends are determined to live life to the hilt.
Joe embarks on a dizzying journey up the ladder of organized crime that takes him from the flash of Jazz Age Boston to the sensual shimmer of Tampa’s Latin Quarter to the sizzling streets of Cuba. Live by Night is a riveting epic layered with a diverse cast of loyal friends and callous enemies, tough rumrunners and sultry femmes fatales, Bible-quoting evangelists and cruel Klansmen, all battling for survival and their piece of the American dream. At once a sweeping love story and a compelling saga of revenge, it is a spellbinding tour de force of betrayal and redemption, music and murder, that brings fully to life a bygone era when sin was cause for celebration and vice was a national virtue.
You can check out the video interview with Affleck in the player below:
