Emilia Clarke, one of the stars of the hit HBO epic GAME OF THRONES is set to join James Franco in THE GARDEN OF LAST DAYS, which the SPRING BREAKERS actor is also to direct. We reported the announcement of Franco’s latest helming effort just the other day, and it looks like the project is moving at speed with financing from Nu Image/Millennium Films.
The story, from a book by Andre Dubus III (THE HOUSE OF SAND AND FOG), is as follows:
One early September night in Florida, a stripper brings her daughter to work. April’s usual babysitter, Jean, has had a panic attack that has landed her in the hospital. April doesn’t really know anyone else, so she decides it’s best to have her three-year-old daughter close by, watching children’s videos in the office while she works.
April works at the Puma Club for Men. And tonight she has an unusual client, a foreigner both remote and too personal, and free with his money. Lots of it, all cash. His name is Bassam. Meanwhile, another man, AJ, has been thrown out of the club for holding hands with his favorite stripper, and he’s drunk and angry and lonely.
From these explosive elements comes a relentless, raw, searing, passionate, page-turning narrative, a big-hearted and painful novel about sex and parenthood and honor and masculinity. Set in the seamy underside of American life at the moment before the world changed, it juxtaposes lust for domination with hunger for connection, sexual violence with family love. It seizes the reader by the throat with the same psychological tension, depth, and realism that characterized Andre Dubus III’s best-selling House of Sand and Fog—and an even greater sense of the dark and anguished places in the human heart.
Clarke, according to The Hollywood Reporter, will play a stripper who brings her 3-year-old daughter to work.
Gerard Butler (yes that one), Alan Siegel, Danielle Robinson, Hanna Weg, Vince Jolivette and Miles Levy produce from a script by Weg.
Source: The Hollywood Reporter
