Jason Bateman to film Nicole Kidman in “Family Fang” bestseller adaptation

PanARMENIAN.Net - Jason Bateman, who made an auspicious feature directorial debut with the Toronto festival smash Bad Words, next will direct Nicole Kidman in The Family Fang, the adaptation of the Kevin Wilson bestseller. Bateman will also star in the film, Deadline said.

The script is by David Lindsay-Abaire, who adapted his Pulitzer Prize-winning play Rabbit Hole as a vehicle that got Kidman an Oscar nomination. Olympus Pictures’ Leslie Urdang and Dean Vanech will produce with Blossom Films partners Kidman and Per Saari, Aggregate Films partners Bateman and Jim Garavente, and QED International’s Bill Block.

QED will finance, and principal photography will begin next year.

The Family Fang is about a couple of performance artists who routinely sucked their kids into taking part in a variety of bizarre events. When the full-grown children return home in a state of crisis, they are unwittingly enlisted to help in the execution of a daring and mysterious final performance by their parents, who are hellbent on achieving the act of a lifetime. Their kids harbor more than a little resentment and blame the performance art for how badly their own lives have turned out.

Bateman’s Bad Words, in which he plays a trash-talking man who finds a loophole that allows him to compete against pint-sized wordsmiths in a spelling bee, got raves at Toronto, where Focus Features beat out others to acquire world rights for $6 million in one of the festival’s biggest deals. He has been kicking the tires on this project for a while, and it became real when QED’s Block signed on with the funding. He’ll introduce it at AFM.