Tommy Lee Jones is planning to adapt, produce, direct, and star in a film version of Ernest Hemingway's posthumous novel Island in the Stream (Scribner, 1970), Reuters reports. Morgan Freeman and John Goodman are reportedly in discussions to be involved in the project. It will be the second adaptation of the novel: George C. Scott starred in a version, directed by Franklin J. Schaffner, in 1977.
Jones, who starred in the Coen brothers' Academy Award-winning film No Country for Old Men, based on Cormac McCarthy's 2006 novel, says Island in the Stream will have an estimaged budget of $30 million. It will be shot in Puerto Rico; production will start next March.
The novel, which was published nine years after Hemingway killed himself, is a portrait of the inner life of Thomas Hudson and his experiences as a painter on the island of Bimini and in the navy off the coast of Cuba during World War II.
