"Twilight" star Kristen Stewart told USA Today that she has been cast as Marylou in Walter Salles' adaptation of Jack Kerouac's iconic novel "On the Road."
"Tron Legacy" star Garret Hedlund will play Neal Cassady's alter ego Dean Moriarty and Sam Riley ("Control") is set to star as his traveling companion Sal Paradise, Kerouac's literary alter ego. Stewart will play Hedlund's young wife.
I somehow managed to avoid reading the book in high school but Stewart has always fared better in films where she's not fending off the romantic advances of vampires and werewolves, so perhaps "On the Road" will offer her the opportunity to showcase the quiet charisma she displayed in Sean Penn's "Into the Wild."
According to the Hollywood Reporter, French production company MK2 will produce the $25 million film in collaboration with Film4 in the U.K. and Brazil's Videofilmes. "On the Road" is expected to begin production this August before Stewart segues to Bill Condon's "Breaking Dawn."
Prominent directors such as Francis Ford Coppola and Gus Van Sant have previously tried to bring the classic 1957 novel about disaffected members of the Beat Generation to the bigscreen, to no avail.
Brazilian director Salles is best known for directing the young Che Guevara biopic "The Motorcycle Diaries." Jose Rivera, the Oscar-nominated writer of that film, has also adapted "On the Road" for Salles.
"In Search of On the Road," a documentary about Salles' efforts to bring the novel to the screen, recently screened at the San Francisco International Film Festival. Salles has previously said that any film adaptation would need to be shot in black and white to be done correctly, though there has been no official word regarding Salles' final decision.
