Best known for writing the screenplays for “Venom,” “Fifty Shades of Grey,” and “Saving Mr. Banks,” Kelly Marcel is set to make her directorial debut. The BAFTA nominee has been tapped by Legendary Entertainment to adapt, direct, and produce “Ferryman,” the first book in Claire McFall’s best-selling YA trilogy. Deadline broke the news.
Published in 2013, “Ferryman” is “a modern retelling of the ancient Greek myth of Charon, the ferryman of Hades who transported souls to the underworld.” The book “follows a young girl named Dylan as she emerges from the debris of a train crash on an empty Scottish landscape,” the source summarizes. “Believing herself to be the only survivor, she learns instead that she is the only fatality – and is trapped in a dangerous limbo. She meets a mysterious boy named Tristan, her ‘ferryman,’ sent to guide her through the wasteland and into the afterlife, but they fall in love with perilous consequences.”
“Ferryman” won the Scottish Teen Book Award and was nominated for the Carnegie Medal. The second installment of the franchise hit shelves in 2017 and the final book is slated for release this spring.
Marcel is attached to write a number of projects in the pipeline, including “Venom 2,” an untitled Elvis Presley biopic, and “Cruella,” Disney’s live-action feature about the “101 Dalmatians” villain starring Emma Stone.
“Working in [a] video store was my education,” Marcel has said. “Nothing is going to teach you structure like watching endless movies and TV shows. Seeing what’s good and why it’s good. Seeing what doesn’t work and figuring out why it doesn’t.” She added, “It cannot be said enough that no matter how good anyone thinks a script is, if you don’t have the right director -- a person who will love it and own it as much as you have up to this point -- then you are completely screwed.”
