Siân Heder and Sarah Polley Developing ‘The Blue Afternoon That Lasted Forever’ for Paramount
According to Above the Line, Siân Heder has found her next film to direct, following last year’s Best Picture winner CODA. It is The Blue Afternoon That Lasted Forever, an adaptation of the short story by Daniel H. Wilson which is being set up at Paramount. Women Talking scribe Sarah Polley is in talks to rewrite it.
Back in 2020, the studio won the rights to produce the spec script that Wilson wrote, adapting his own short story. The short story focuses on Eric, a physicist who, working for the NASA, discovers that a black hole will devour planet Earth within days. However, the only person that believes him is his 10-year-old daughter. Netflix just developed a Best Picture nominee with similar themes, Adam McKay’s Don’t Look Up, which might be why Paramount is looking at a rewrite of the script. (A title change would also help its marketability, if we may add.)
Sarah Polley and Siân Heder are the latest winners in the Best Adapted Screenplay category, with their respective films scoring Best Picture nominations (and Heder’s CODA winning) but sitting out the Best Director category. CODA also won an Oscar for Best Supporting Actor (Troy Kotsur). Polley started in the business as an actress, but transitioned into directing with 2006’s Away From Her, which she followed up with Take This Waltz and the acclaimed documentary Stories We Tell (2012). Women Talking was the first film she had directed since then.
Her writing career has also shaped a similar path, with said film being her first feature film script since Take This Waltz. She wrote the short Making a Scene and six episodes of Alias Grace too. As she revealed in her essay collection Run Towards the Danger (2022), she suffered from a traumatic head injury that resulted in post-concussion syndrome, with symptoms that lasted for four years, leaving her incapacitated to work.
Miguel Fernández is a Spanish student that has movies as his second passion in life. His favorite movie of all time is The Lord of the Rings, but he is also a huge Star Wars fan. However, fantasy movies are not his only cup of tea, as authors like Scorsese, Fincher, Kubrick or Hitchcock have been an obsession for him since he started to understand the language of filmmaking. He is that guy who will watch a black and white movie, just because it is in black and white.
