RYAN ESLINGER CASTS SHARON STONE
When I interviewed 23-year-old Ryan Eslinger for last year’s “25 New Faces” issue, he told me he was relocating from New York to Los Angeles. I was a bit skeptical that the very serious young director I’d been speaking with would be able to play the game and ply his idiosyncratic science-and-madness themed work in Hollywood. Perhaps I was wrong. Check out this breaking news story by Allison James in Variety:
American filmmaker Ryan Eslinger has snagged Sharon Stone to star in his $2 million indie project When a Man Falls in a Forest, and he’s also penning a script for her to direct.
In the as-yet-unfinanced pic, Stone is attached to play an unhappily married woman who shoplifts to relieve her suffering. The woman is one of four sad, middle-class characters living in a small town in the Midwest.
Eslinger’s first pic, Madness and Genius, drew critical acclaim and a William Morris Agency contract for the then 22-year-old novice helmer when it unspooled at the Toronto Film Festival in 2003.
New effort is one of 18 projects featured in the Cannes Film Festival’s “Atelier du Cinema” line-up of pics looking for coin. It has also been selected for The Sundance Institute’s filmmakers lab next month.
In a separate project initiated by Stone, also repped by William Morris, Eslinger is penning a script for the actress to direct. Eslinger said the screenplay’s scientific theme has echoes of his Madness and Genius.
Made with helmer’s savings of $19,000, Genius is about a student who blackmails his teacher in order to steal a scientific discovery and claim it as his own — “Stanley Kubrick meets Good Will Hunting,” in the helmer’s words.
Eslinger said “It will be a challenge for her to play a Midwestern housewife.”
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