Deadline is reporting that Oscar-winning filmmaker Michel Hazanavicius (The Artist) has joined Enormous Pictures’ CGI-animated movie Little Jules Verne, which reimagines the early life of the French writer whose classic adventure novels include Journey to the Center of the Earth, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea and Around the World in Eighty Days.
Hazanavicius has been working on the dialogue and script originally penned by Anne and Gerard Guero (Tales of the Dragon Guard) and Pierre-Gilles Stehr (Oggy and the Cockroaches). It will mark the first project that Hazanavicius has worked on that he hasn’t directed, with that task falling to Regis Vidal and Didier Ah-Koon.
“[I was attracted by] the exercise of confronting myself with a more childlike universe, to really respond to a request and to put myself in service of someone else’s project,” said Hazanavicius. “I really enjoy writing, and this was a pleasant experience: the relative short length of the mission, the idea that I could help a film to be born, and the tenacity and engagement of Benoît Pierre, who convinced me to do it.”
