Rebecca Morrison is a lawyer and writer. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, TODAY, NBC News, Salon, HuffPost, and Newsweek, among others. She was born in Iran, and now lives in the Washington DC area with her husband and two kids.
Here Morrison shares some ideas for the above the line talent for an adaptation of The Blue Dress, her debut novel:
I didn’t have any actors in mind when I was writing The Blue Dress, but if it were ever made into a film, I would hope they cast Iranian-American actors. The story is based on my life and follows a 13-year-old Iranian girl who comes to America. She has a deep yearning to belong, a crush on a boy, and is navigating a complicated and heartbreaking relationship with her mother, who pushes her to lose weight. There's an actress in the new reboot of Scrubs, Layla Mohammadi, who’d be wonderful as the mother in my story. The mom is a complex character that we judge harshly at first, but then empathise and maybe even root for at the end.Visit Rebecca Morrison's website.
And this might sound a little crazy, but I’d want Jacob Tierney, the director of Heated Rivalry to do the movie. I love the way he handles the tension of a crush. When you’re thirteen, those feelings are enormous. I think he would do such a beautiful job capturing Yasmin’s experiences, some of which are so dark, painful, and full of shame. Even though that show was made for adults, so much of it is about emotional intensity. And that fits so well with the feelings of adolescence, the angst, the longing, the rivalries, the pain, the feeling that everything matters so much. He could bring Yasmin’s experience to life: her first serious conflict with her mom, first time she hurts her body with her eating disorder, first time being vilified for her ethnicity, her first crush and nemesis, all the big emotional stakes of trying to figure out who she is in a new world.
--Marshal Zeringue
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