Madeleine Dunnigan's "Jean"

Madeleine Dunnigan is a writer and screenwriter from London. She was a Jill Davis Fellow on the MFA at New York University. While there she was awarded a GRI Fellowship in Paris.

Here Dunnigan shares some ideas for the director and principal actors in an adaptation of her new novel, Jean:

Jean is a novel set in a hippie, rural English boarding school for boys with ‘problems’. At its heart is Jean: antisocial, violent, with a refugee single-mother, and on a scholarship, Jean is an outcast even among these outcasts. But then he strikes up a friendship with Tom, a wealthier, fee-paying boy at the school. When things turn romantic, it seems as if Jean has finally found a way to transcend the trappings of his former life. Yet inevitably reality comes crashing in, and Jean must find a new way to escape.

From its inception, my novel Jean has had a strong connection with film. When I described it to people, I would often call it ‘an English Call Me By Your Name’. Andre Aciman’s novel was a huge influence; but it was Luca Guadagnino’s adaptation that informed the visual language of my book. The touches, the looks, the way Jean and Tom interact with and within nature. Similarly Francis Lee’s God’s Own Country showed me how to write queerness within a rural setting; and the heartbreaking tenderness that can come out of new love. One of my favourite films of all time is Lynne Ramsay’s Movern Callar: for its sparse dialogue and for its masterful use of music. Jean would be nothing without music. If Guadagnino, Lee or Ramsay wanted to direct the movie of Jean, I would jump for joy.

While the directorial vision for Jean has always been clear to me, actors have been less so. Harris Dickinson’s ability to transform into a troubled teen in Beach Rats makes him a front runner in my mind, but of course now he is too old. And when I think of Tom, I see Josh O’Connor, but, of course, he is also too old. I think of the actors in Skins, or Timothée Chalamet in Call Me By Your Name, young actors on the cusp of discovery. My instinct is that Jean and Tom would need to be played by people not yet known…and that these roles would launch them into their starlit and celestial careers!

Visit Madeleine Dunnigan's website.

--Marshal Zeringue