In the news for the wrong reasons last week with a reported on-set bust-up with director David O. Russell (which she has denied as false), Oscar winner Jennifer Lawrence is set to star in the new film from Steven Spielberg.
Deadline reports that Lawrence is set to star in an adaptation of It’s What I Do: A Photographer’s Life of Love and War, a memoir by Lynsey Addario. Warner Bros. Pictures has secured the rights to the book, which was released last month. Here’s the official description of the book:
Lynsey Addario was just finding her way as a photographer when September 11th changed the world. One of the few photojournalists with experience in Afghanistan, she gets the call to return and cover the American invasion. She makes a decision she would often find herself making—not to stay home, not to lead a quiet or predictable life, but to risk her life, to set out across the world, and to make a name for herself. It’s What I Do follows a course unavoidable for Addario—from her first camera and the pictures it inspired, to early years as a street photographer and the inspiration she found in the work of Sebastião Salgado. Photography becomes a way for her to travel with a purpose—a singular ambition that shapes and drives her.
As a woman photojournalist determined to be taken as seriously as her male peers, Addario fights her way into a boy’s club of a profession, eventually earning widespread recognition, a MacArthur Genius Grant, and a Pulitzer Prize. Refusing to turn down career-defining assignments, she puts romance and family on hold. Yet the sadness and injustice she encounters as as a conflict reporter give her a new vision for her own life, and the more she sees of the world, the greater her desires for love and family grow. It’s What I Do is also the story of how Addario met her husband and father to their child, and how as a war correspondent and a mother, she learned to live her life in two different—though hardly separate—worlds.
Watching uprisings unfold and people fight to the death for their freedom, Addario understands she is documenting not only news but also the fate of society. It’s What I Do is more than just a snapshot of life on the front lines; it is witness to the human cost of war.
The film has no date yet in terms of a release or a shooting start date, but will probably go into production after Lawrence finishes work on Joy, her latest team up with Silver Linings Playbook director Russell, and reprising her role as Mystique in X-Men: Apocalypse, which is set to shoot this summer. Spielberg is currently working on Cold War film St. James Place with Tom Hanks, and is set to make a new version of Roald Dahl’s The BFG thereafter.
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Originally published March 3, 2015. Updated April 13, 2018.
