With all the excitement surrounding Christopher Nolan’s first post-Batman feature, Interstellar, it seems to have been forgotten by many that the director and screenwriter adapted Ruth Rendell’s novel The Keys To The Street for the big screen. That project now has its two leads in Gemma Arterton and Tim Roth, and will kick off production in January.
Czech director Julius Sevcik (Normal) is set to helm the film, which takes place in London. Sevcik is a young director, with his last directorial credit coming in 2009, but he’s known for creating dark and intriguing thrillers. Normal, or as it’s fully titled: Normal: the Düsseldorf Ripper, earned Sevcik best director honors at the Shanghai Film Festival in 2009.
The book follows Mary, a woman who starts house-sitting in order to escape her violent ex-boyfriend Alastair (Roth). A series of murders of the homeless occurs in the neighborhood, while she starts an affair with a man whose life she prolonged by donating him blood marrow.
While it would definitely be awesome to see Nolan direct this, the fact he wrote it bodes well for the project. He’s obviously a very skilled writer, and there’s no doubt that Sevcik is capable of taking that script and creating a taut crime thriller.
The book, written in 1996, is a popular British mystery, so there should be quite the audience built in purely because of that. The fact Nolan worked on the script should bring in the American audiences too, so I’d expect a lot more interest coming for this film as production moves along.
What do you think of The Keys Of The Street? Do you like who has been cast? Share your thoughts in the comments section below.
