Screen adaptations of Ernest Hemingway’s works have been a rarity in recent years—a lost generation?—but now, a movie version of the author’s 1950 novel, Across the River and Into the Trees, is in development, starring Liev Schreiber, according to Deadline.
It will be adapted by English playwright Peter Flannery and helmed by Spanish director Paula Ortiz, whose previous movie, The Bride (2015), was based on a Federico García Lorca play. It’s set to begin filming next year in Venice, Italy, where the story takes place.
In the book, set in the mid 1940s, a middle-aged, seriously ill American Army colonel recounts memories of his experiences in two world wars to his current lover, a teenage Italian girl named Renata.
Across the River and Into the Trees was the first novel that Hemingway had published since For Whom the Bell Tolls, 10 years before, and it received mostly negative reviews—including Kirkus’: “Frankly, I found it difficult reading,” our reviewer wrote. “There’s crassness, lack of subtlety, needless vulgarity in the content, while the style has the erratic abruptness, elisions, and awkwardness that characterizes Hemingway at his least successful.”
There have been many film and TV versions of Hemingway’s novels and short stories, but most were made before his death in 1961. Two different versions of the 1929 classic A Farewell to Arms made it to the screen (in 1932 and 1957), and the book To Have and Have Not (1937) yielded a classic Howard Hawks–directed movie in 1944, starring Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall. The last theatrical film adaptation of a Hemingway novel was The Garden of Eden, which was released in 2010.
Until now, Across the River and Into the Trees had never been adapted in any form. In 2016, the Hollywood Reporter noted that Pierce Brosnan was set to star in a big-screen movie version, but that never came to fruition.
David Rapp is the senior Indie editor.
