One of Britain's hottest young film-makers has abandoned plans to make a film of the Patrick Hamilton play Gaslight - and is jetting off to Hollywood instead to direct a drama about schizophrenia and homelessness starring Jamie Foxx.
Joe Wright, who enjoyed Jane Austen box office success with Keira Knightley in 2005's sharp and sexy Pride and Prejudice, and who has an eagerly anticipated adaptation of the Ian McEwan novel Atonement already in the bag, will be making a film in Los Angeles for the first time on the as-yet-untitled Foxx project.
By coincidence, Wright's girlfriend Rosamund Pike is starring in a production of Gaslight at London's Old Vic. Written in 1938, the play is a psychological drama about an abusive husband who persuades his wife she is going mad.
"I tried to adapt Gaslight in a contemporary setting but couldn't make it work," says Wright. "In retrospect, attempting to modernise it was fairly stupid - it's called Gaslight, for Christ's sake."
Wright's new project will be produced by Working Title, who, having worked on Wright's previous two films, seem to be nurturing the kind of partnership they have enjoyed with the screenwriter Richard Curtis.
"He's probably the best debut director I have ever worked with," says Working Title's Tim Bevan. "He's thorough, detailed and works intensely."
· Actor Benedict Cumberbatch will soon be hard to miss. Having been nominated for a Bafta for the title role in the BBC's Hawking, Cumberbatch will appear on the big screen alongside Scarlett Johansson and Natalie Portman in The Other Boleyn Girl, due next year.
He is also starring in a BBC/HBO adaptation of Alexander Masters' non-fiction book, Stuart: A Life Backwards, about a "thief, hostage taker, psycho and sociopathic street raconteur" that the author met in 1998. Cumberbatch plays the Cambridge academic who befriends Stuart.
And, as if that wasn't enough, Cumberbatch has just landed roles in two of the Royal Court's autumn openings: the satirical plays Rhinocerous and The Arsonist.
