Steven Spielberg has been piling on one project after another lately, beginning with his Cold War thriller possibly titled St. James Place, followed by adaptations The BFG and Thank You for Your Service. There's even the chance he directs the next Indiana Jones movie. While having a schedule like that would be too much for most directors, Spielberg's making room for a chance to work with Jennifer Lawrence.
According to Deadline, Spielberg and Lawrence will team up on an adaptation of Lynsey Addario's memoir It’s What I Do: A Photographer’s Life Of Love and War. Spielberg will direct Lawrence in the film which chronicle's Addario's career as a war photographer in a male-dominated field. Here's the book synopsis:
War photographer Lynsey Addario’s memoir It’s What I Do is
the story of how the relentless pursuit of truth, in virtually every
major theater of war in the twenty-first century, has shaped her life.
What she does, with clarity, beauty, and candor, is to document, often
in their most extreme moments, the complex lives of others. It’s her
work, but it’s much more than that: it’s her singular calling.
Lynsey Addario was just finding her way as a young photographer when September 11 changed the world. One of the few photojournalists with experience in Afghanistan, she gets the call to return and cover the American invasion. She makes a decision she would often find herself making—not to stay home, not to lead a quiet or predictable life, but to set out across the world, face the chaos of crisis, and make a name for herself.
Addario finds a way to travel with a purpose. She photographs the Afghan people before and after the Taliban reign, the civilian casualties and misunderstood insurgents of the Iraq War, as well as the burned villages and countless dead in Darfur. She exposes a culture of violence against women in the Congo and tells the riveting story of her headline-making kidnapping by pro-Qaddafi forces in the Libyan civil war.
Addario takes bravery for granted but she is not fearless. She uses her fear and it creates empathy; it is that feeling, that empathy, that is essential to her work. We see this clearly on display as she interviews rape victims in the Congo, or photographs a fallen soldier with whom she had been embedded in Iraq, or documents the tragic lives of starving Somali children. Lynsey takes us there and we begin to understand how getting to the hard truth trumps fear.
As a woman photojournalist determined to be taken as seriously as her male peers, Addario fights her way into a boys’ club of a profession. Rather than choose between her personal life and her career, Addario learns to strike a necessary balance. In the man who will become her husband, she finds at last a real love to complement her work, not take away from it, and as a new mother, she gains an all the more intensely personal understanding of the fragility of life.
Watching uprisings unfold and people fight to the death for their freedom, Addario understands she is documenting not only news but also the fate of society. It’s What I Do is more than just a snapshot of life on the front lines; it is witness to the human cost of war.
The story is similar to last year's drama A Thousand Times Goodnight which starred Juliette Binoche and was based on a war photographer's real life experience.
Sounds like perfect material for both Spielberg and Lawrence, but with no writer attached yet this is still a long way from coming together.
