Hugh Laurie wll star in a big-screen version of the novel Mr. Pip, according to Variety. The film will revolve around Mr. Watts (Laurie), a schoolteacher whose student finds an imaginary friend in the character of Pip from the Charles Dickens novel Great Expectations.
Andrew Adamson, who directed the first two Narnia films is on board to adapt the Lloyd Jones novel, and to wield the megaphone on the project.
Novel Synopsis: On a copper-rich tropical island shattered by war, where the teachers have fled with most everyone else, only one white man chooses to stay behind: the eccentric Mr. Watts, object of much curiosity and scorn, who sweeps out the ruined schoolhouse and begins to read to the children each day from Charles Dickens’s classic ‘Great Expectations’.
So begins this rare, original story about the abiding strength that imagination, once ignited, can provide. As artillery echoes in the mountains, thirteen-year-old Matilda and her peers are riveted by the adventures of a young orphan named Pip in a city called London, a city whose contours soon become more real than their own blighted landscape. As Mr. Watts says, “A person entranced by a book simply forgets to breathe.” Soon come the rest of the villagers, initially threatened, finally inspired to share tales of their own that bring alive the rich mythology of their past. But in a ravaged place where even children are forced to live by their wits and daily survival is the only objective, imagination can be a dangerous thing.
