Bret Easton Ellis’ collection at HBO is inching nearer to actuality. HBO has tapped Kristoffer Borgli to direct the collection adaptation of the Ellis e-book “The Shards.”
Borgli, who directed final yr’s “Dream State of affairs” starring Nicolas Cage and 2022’s “Sick of Myself,” is hooked up to direct and function an government producer on the collection that’s at present in improvement at HBO.
Ellis printed “The Shards” simply final yr, and the collection per its official logline is “set within the early ’80s and tracks a bunch of privileged Los Angeles Excessive Faculty associates as a serial killer strikes throughout the town.”
However what makes “The Shards” ripe for an adaptation is that it’s a pulpy and horny but sprawling and unwieldy piece of fiction that includes a lot of Ellis’ personal biography. Whereas it follows the murders of a serial killer often known as The Trawler with nice element, it additionally follows the sexual exploits of a 17-year-old bisexual named Bret, a San Fernando Valley trust-fund prep-school child writing a e-book referred to as “Much less Than Zero.” Not solely that, “The Shards” may be very almost a direct transcript of a group of serials Ellis started publishing on his Patreon in 2020.
As beforehand introduced, Ellis is solely writing the collection adaptation of “The Shards” and also will government produce alongside “The White Lotus” EP Nick Corridor and Brian Younger and Kathleen McCaffrey.
Whereas Ellis’ success in movie and TV has been hit and miss, this HBO collection has an opportunity to be probably the most bold and profitable since 2000’s “American Psycho.” Ellis beforehand wrote 2020’s “Smiley Confronted Killers” and he had a 2016 webseries on Fullscreen referred to as “The Deleted.” He’s additionally itching to lastly make his directorial debut on a horror movie referred to as “Relapse” that can star “Stranger Issues” actor Joseph Quinn.
Borgli taking over a interval drama needs to be a captivating change of tempo, because the director talked with IndieWire final yr about how his movies thus far have been about “mass tradition and recognition and standing, and what that appears like now,” and the way that usually dovetails with a commentary about social media.
“Our self-worth is now via the eyes of others,” he mentioned. “I believe it has supplied a proxy for feeling achieved. In the identical method that quick meals was a foul supply for operating a wholesome life, it’s the empty energy of standing. The wholesome model is: You are attempting to perform one thing, one thing that is likely to be troublesome, and one thing that individuals would possibly worth when you’ve accomplished it. Social media has simply gotten rid of that drawback. You don’t have to attain something, you simply have to go exhausting with a private branding and making your self the product.”
Borgli is repped by UTA and Granderson Des Rochers.