Alias Grace star Sarah Gadon to direct film adaptation of Heather O'Neill's Lullabies for Little Criminals
Canadian actor Sarah Gadon is set to make her directorial debut in the feature film adaptation of Heather O'Neill's novel Lullabies for Little Criminals, which won Canada Reads in 2007.
Gadon will write the screenplay and produce according to Brightlight Pictures, the Vancouver-based production company behind the adaptation. Production is slated to take place in Montreal.
Gadon, a TIFF Rising Star alumnus and Canadian Screen Award-winning actor, recently starred in the film adaptation of Cea Sunrise Person's 2014 memoir, North of Normal, which had its premiere at TIFF this year. She is also this year's TIFF Micki Moore Writer in Residency.
Gadon is best known for her role as Grace Marks in the CBC miniseries Alias Grace, which was adapted from Margaret Atwood's bestselling novel by Canadian actor, writer and director Sarah Polley.
The film will share the same title as the novel and follow 13-year-old Baby, who is under the care of her father Jules. Jules struggles with drug addiction and leaves Baby to her own devices. When her beauty captures the attention of a local pimp, Baby teeters between childhood and the dark world of adult temptation, where she faces volatile situations that threaten to crush her spirit.
Lullabies for Little Criminals won the all-star edition of Canada Reads in 2007, where all five panellists were previous winners. Musician John K. Samson successfully championed the novel. It also took home the Hugh MacLennan Prize for fiction and was a finalist for the Governor General's Literary Award for fiction.
"[Gadon] is going to do something really cool," O'Neill told CBC Books. "There [is] something about that it would be her first film and for me, it was my first book. The first book is such a leap of faith … that I thought maybe it would be interesting to watch someone else do a leap of faith."
O'Neill is an award-winning author from Montreal and the first back-to-back finalist for the Scotiabank Giller Prize: her novel The Girl Who Was Saturday Night was a finalist in 2014 and her short story collection Daydreams of Angels was a finalist in 2015.
She says she gave the rights to Lullabies for Little Criminals, her debut novel, to Gadon over a year ago.
"People have approached me for years and I've had so many meetings but my instincts never felt right … I sort of thought I'd never sell the rights."
O'Neill first met Gadon in 2018 at Biblio Bash — a fundraiser for the Toronto Public Library Foundation. After that, Gadon set up a meeting with the Montreal writer to pitch a film adaptation of Lullabies for Little Criminals.
"I think something that she said that really stuck out was that she had been a child actress so she knew how to direct children in sensitive ways, which was a huge concern for me," O'Neill explained. "The way she talked about how she would approach the children in the film and protect all the actors in it, gave me so much confidence and an anxiety that I had was removed."
Although not formally involved in the production of the film, O'Neill says Gadon has left the door open for collaboration.
Details on when production is set to begin have yet to be announced.
O'Neill's latest novel, When We Lost Our Heads, was published earlier this year.
LISTEN | Heather O'Neill discusses her novel When We Lost Our Heads:
