For Laika’s upcoming adaptation of Susanna Clarke’s novel Piranesi, film director and company president Travis Knight has attached screenwriter Dave Kajganich to create the screenplay. The film is to be completed in the stop-motion style that Laika has become famous for, continuing with previous films including Coraline (the studio’s first feature, directed by the famed stop-motion animator Henry Selick), Paranorman, and Knight’s own Kubo And The Two Strings.

Kajganich began his career with the first released film scripted by him, The Invasion (2007), an adjusted for the current world restyling of the classic horror film Invasion Of The Body Snatchers, starring Daniel Craig and Nicole Kidman. Kajganich’s biggest success has been his lengthy and highly acclaimed collaboration with Italian film director Luca Guadagnino. For Guadagnino, Kajganich has similarly reimagined in the same vein as The Invasion classic films such as the sexy French poolside thriller La Piscine with A Bigger Splash and the surreal Italian horror film Suspiria with the remake of the same name. Kajganich has also adapted Camille DeAngelis’s novel Bones & All, also directed by Guadagnino in his usual style of tenderness and sensuality mixed with high emotions.

Clarke’s novel is a fantasy story centered around themes of memory and identity as its titular narrator lives in and explores a house with magical and infinite dimensions. The premise of the novel seems ripe for Laika and Knight’s animation form, which has traditionally been praised for its inventiveness, such as in the use of 3D animation with Coraline. Though published recently in 2020, Kajganich has related his effusive passion for the book and the importance of being the writer behind the adaptation in tandem with Knight as director as for him: “Piranesi changed my soul and is one of the books in all the world, of any era, I most cherish.”