Matthew Wilder To Direct Joan Didion Biopic; Enfant Terrible To Launch Sales At AFM
deadline.comEXCLUSIVE: Matthew Wilder has been set to write and direct an untitled film that chronicles the life and work of author Joan Didion.
The plan is to paint a dreamlike day in the life of Didion and California in the late 1960s, when the brilliant young journalist is hurtled from encounters with jailed Manson girls to protesting Black Panthers, and from Nancy Reagan pausing in a photo op to Vietnam War POWs — climaxing with an epilogue in a near-future California where an AI Joan encounters a dystopia beyond her wildest anxiety dreams.
The film, produced under David Michaels’ Enfant Terrible Cinema, will shoot in Los Angeles in the first or second quarter of 2024.
Financing is being discussed with potential partners this week at AFM. A National Book Award winner and recipient of a National Humanities Medal, Didion’s account of grief and loss in 2005’s The Year of Magical Thinking and 1970’s Play It As It Lays remain among her most prolific work. “I read every published word Joan wrote, then put it all in a blender,” writer-director Wilder says. “We took all the history and the culture of the period, and what was going on in Joan’s head, and created something fast-moving, lyrical and strange.
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