According to The Hollywood Reporter, Ben Taylor is now attached to direct the Tristar rom-com The Rosie Project, marking Taylor’s feature film directorial debut. The British filmmaker has been at the helm for all three seasons of Amazon’s raunchy comedy Catastrophe starring Sharon Horgan and Rob Delaney.
Graeme Simsion adapted the screenplay from his own best-selling debut novel of the same name, with a subsequent draft by by Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber (The Fault in Our Stars). The story centers on Don Tillman, a professor of genetics, who decides he needs to find a wife and goes about it applying scientific methods and using a survey to screen out unacceptable qualities like drinking and smoking. The titular Rosie, brilliant but unpredictable, is someone he screens out at first, but a relationship slowly develops between Don and Rosie as he helps her in her quest to find her biological father.
Michael Costigan (Ghost in the Shell) and Matt Tolmach (The Amazing Spider-Man) are producing. Hannah Minghella and Nicole Brown are overseeing for TriStar. Megastar and Oscar-winning actress Jennifer Lawrence (Passengers) and Oscar-nominated director Richard Linklater (Boyhood) were initially attached to the project, but no longer. The search is on to cast the two leads. We will keep you posted as news develops.