Academy Award nominee Michelle Pfeiffer (Murder on the Orient Express), Academy Award® nominee Lucas Hedges (Manchester by the Sea, Boy Erased) and Tracy Letts (The Post, Lady Bird) have signed on to star in surrealist comedy French Exit with Azazel Jacobs (Terri, The Lovers) attached to direct. Patrick deWitt (The Sisters Brothers, Terri) adapted the screenplay which is based on his international bestselling book of the same name that was shortlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize. Thorsten Schumacher’s Rocket Science is financing and producing the film, with Elevation Pictures also producing. Rocket Science and Wild Bunch are handling international sales, beginning in Cannes. CAA Media Finance is representing the U.S. rights.
“My plan was to die before the money ran out,” says 60-year-old penniless Manhattan socialite Frances Price (Michelle Pfeiffer), but things didn’t go as planned. Her husband Franklin has been dead for 20 years and with his vast inheritance gone, she cashes in the last of her possessions and resolves to live out her twilight days anonymously in a modest apartment in Paris, accompanied by her directionless son Malcolm (Hedges) and the embodiment of Franklin in the form of ‘Small Frank’ (Letts), the family cat.
Pfeiffer has starred in the most recent films of Marvel’s Ant-Man and the Wasp, Twentieth Century Fox’s Murder on the Orient Express and Paramount Pictures’ Mother!. She will next be seen opposite Angelina Jolie and Elle Fanning in Disney’s Maleficent: Mistress of Evil. She received Academy Award® nominations for her roles in The Fabulous Baker Boys, Love Field and Dangerous Liaisons.
With an Academy Award nomination for his role in Manchester by the Sea and a Golden Globe nomination for his performance in Boy Erased, Hedges has starred in such acclaimed films as Academy Award winner Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, Academy Award nominee Lady Bird, Ben is Back alongside Julia Roberts and Sundance breakout Honey Boy.
Letts is a Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award Winning actor with past credits include Twentieth Century Fox’s Academy Award® nominee The Post, Paramount Pictures’ Academy Award® winner The Big Short and Academy Award® nominee Lady Bird. He is currently in post-production on Twentieth Century Fox’s Ford v. Ferrari.
Jacobs wrote and directed The Lovers starring Debra Winger and Tracy Letts and Terri starring Jacob Wysocki and John C. Reilly, which was written by deWitt. Additional credits include Amazon’s Golden Globe® winning “Mozart in the Jungle” starring Lola Kirke and Gael García Bernal and HBO’s “Doll & Em” starring Emily Mortimer and Dolly Wells.
