Mr. Affleck, please don’t make a fool of me again.
It seemed obvious a couple years ago (check out my posts from May 2013 and July 2013) that Ben Affleck was poised to direct and act in an adaptation of Dennis Lehane’s Edgar Award-winning Live by Night — and it certainly looked like much of the shooting would be done in Savannah and/or along the Georgia coast.
Of course, anything can happen in the movie business.
Now, it’s being widely reported — including in the Savannah Morning News — that Affleck is poised to make a movie on the Georgia coast. Some sources have not named the project, but The Brunswick News reports that it is indeed Live by Night.
It’s worth noting that reporting in fall 2014 linked Zoe Saldana, Elle Fanning, and Sienna Miller to Live by Night. According to the Internet Movie Database, the film is still slated for a 2016 release.
Affleck has other projects in the works, of course. He will star in a David Fincher remake of Strangers on a Train (the Hitchcock version and the Patricia Highsmith novel set a pretty high bar, honestly) and in The Accountant. But those are acting jobs, not directing ones, so it seems somewhat unlikely that Affleck would be looking for locations for those.
I have not read Lehane’s Live by Night but a couple of friends gave it strong reviews. According to Amazon, the story involves “one man’s rise from Boston petty thief to the Gulf Coast’s most successful rum runner.”