Kimberly Peirce built her career directing movies about young people at critical moments in their lives. Her breakout film Boys Don't Cry earned Hillary Swank her first Best Actress Oscar, she followed that up with the Iraq War film Stop-Loss, and most recently the Carrie remake which I think has gotten a bad wrap. While Peirce has been busy with TV the last couple of years, she is now back to direct her biggest film yet, an adaptation of Viktor Frankl's memoir, Man's Search for Meaning.
While a screenwriter has yet to be named, Peirce will be behind the camera for a film based on Frankl's time as a psychiatrist sent to the Nazi death camps, and how he learned to help others find meaning in their lives, even in the most hopeless of situations. Here's a synopsis for the book:
Psychiatrist Viktor Frankl’s memoir has riveted generations of readers with its descriptions of life in Nazi death camps and its lessons for spiritual survival. Between 1942 and 1945 Frankl labored in four different camps, including Auschwitz, while his parents, brother, and pregnant wife perished. Based on his own experience and the experiences of others he treated later in his practice, Frankl argues that we cannot avoid suffering but we can choose how to cope with it, find meaning in it, and move forward with renewed purpose. Frankl’s theory-known as logotherapy, from the Greek word logos (“meaning”)-holds that our primary drive in life is not pleasure, as Freud maintained, but the discovery and pursuit of what we personally find meaningful.
So this is a step in a very different direction for Peirce and that's tremendously exciting. I'm curious to see if she calls on any old favorites (Swank, Chloe Moretz, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Channing Tatum) to star or if she turns to some new faces. She's helped build a lot of careers and this could be a chance to do that again. [Deadline]
