Alma Har'el

Source: Tal Abudi

Alma Har’el

Honey Boy director Alma Har’el will make her passion project Mockingbird, the adaptation of the Walter Tevis sci-fi novel, at Searchlight Pictures.

Tevis’s novel takes place in a future of declining human population where drugs and electronic bliss hold sway and there is no art or children. The only thing that can save humanity is the love triangle between an android, a man and a woman.

J. Miles Dale and Robert Schwartz are producing with Har’el and her partner Christopher Leggett, with Alejandro Laguette and Rafael Marmor on board as executive producers.

“I’ll never forget the first time I read Mockingbird on the shore of the Sinai peninsula in Egypt when I was 24 years old,” Har’el said. “This book has changed my life and I’ve been pursuing it for over a decade. I knew that Searchlight was the perfect home for it and I’m thrilled they are partnering with me to bring this to the big screen. Walter Tevis wrote a novel that refuses genre and time, choosing instead to awaken every fibre of your being.”

Tevis’s 1963 novel The Man Who Fell To Earth was recently adapted into the upcoming sci-fi series at Showtime starring Chiwetel Ejiofor, Naomie Harris, Jimmi Simpson, and Kate Mulgrew. It debuts on April 24. The author’s follow-up to Mockingbird, The Queen’s Gambit was adapted into the Emmy-winning Netflix mini-series starring Anya Taylor-Joy.

Har’el is the first woman in DGA Awards history to be nominated for both commercial directing (2018) and narrative directing (2020), for Honey Boy. She is currently in production on Lady In The Lake for Apple TV starring Natalie Portman and Lupita Nyong’o.

Paul Hoffman, head of Searchlight business affairs, negotiated the deal with Schwartz’s Seismic Pictures, Dale’s Demilo Films, and with Susan Schulman of the Susan Schulman Literary Agency for the Tevis Family Trust.

Taylor Friedman and Cornelia Burleigh are overseeing for Searchlight Pictures, reporting to heads of production and development DanTram Nguyen and Katie Goodson-Thomas. Searchlight is planning a theatrical release.

 

Topics