Director Joe Wright boards The Lifeboat with Anne Hathaway, a true story of survival about a shipwreck in 1914.
NewsNo stranger to women in abstract peril narratives, Joe Wright will be approaching the concept in much more harrowing and direct fashion for his next film, The Lifeboat. Based on the true story of an over-capacity lifeboat, Wright will direct Anne Hathaway in a story for survival and death.
Having worked with Working Title or Focus Features on all of his previous films—including Pride & Prejudice, Atonement, and Hanna—Wright returns to those partners for a project that has been stirring at Working Title since Hathaway signed onto the film in 2013.
Adapted from Charlotte Rogan’s 2012 book of the same name, The Lifeboat follows the frightening true story of a lifeboat overfilled with survivors from the 1914 sinking of the transatlantic ocean liner Empress. One of those survivors is Grace Winters (Hathaway), a newlywed who will be forced to pick sides as the lifeboat quickly devolves into factions about who stays and who swims.
This is definitely a return to more dramatic material for Wright who is currently finishing up Pan for Warner Bros. That film reimagines the story of Peter Pan, first written by J.M. Barrie in his 1904 play, into a multi-film epic saga. That picture flies toward the second theater to the right on October 9, 2015.
