Rebecca Thomas Tapped to Direct John Green’s ‘Looking for Alaska’

For her second feature film, Rebecca Thomas will be directing the next John Green adaptation, Looking for Alaska. Green, the YA author who penned the original novels for last year’s The Fault in Our Stars and this summer’s Paper Towns, made the announcement via his Twitter account. 

TFiOS and Paper Towns screenwriting team Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber also co-adapted the Looking for Alaska script, which has been in development with Paramount since 2005 and now seems to be heading quickly towards production.

Looking for Alaska‘s story follows a teen named Miles who attends a new boarding school starting his junior year. There, he meets Alaska – a cool, fun, and mysterious girl that he immediately begins to fall for and who eventually breaks him out of his shell.

Paramount had an opportunity to bring in a fresh, new director for this film due in part to its built-in audience and nearly certified box office success. Thomas certainly fits the bill, being both a female and fairly new director. Her feature directorial debut was the 2012 teen indie Electrick Children.

Now the last step before filming will be to fill out the cast, which will likely be comprised of on-the-rise young actors the likes of TFiOS and Paper Towns stars Shailene Woodley (Insurgent), Ansel Elgort (Men, Women & Children), Nat Wolff (Palo Alto), model Cara Delevingne, and Halston Sage (Neighbors).