‘Glassland’ Helmer Gerard Barrett Set To Helm Dakota Fanning In Denver & Delilah-Produced ‘Brain On Fire’ – Sundance

EXCLUSIVE: Days before his film Glassland competes in the World Cinema Dramatic Competition at Sundance, Gerard Barrett has lined up his next job. He has been set by Denver & Delilah Films and Foundation Features to write and direct a drama based on Susannah Cahalan’s bestselling memoir Brain On Fire: My Month Of Madness. Dakota Fanning is set to star as Cahalan in a drama that details a young woman’s terrifying descent into insanity.

Charlize Theron, Beth Kono, and A.J. Dix will produce for Denver & Delilah. Rob Merilees of Foundation Features will produce and finance. Barrett will be co-producer. The Canadian-Irish co-production will shoot in May in Vancouver and New York. WME Global is representing worldwide rights.

The Irish filmmaker made his debut on Pilgrim Hill, a low-budget study of a farmer battling isolation and loneliness that premiered at the Irish Galway Film Fleadh. Glassland stars Jack Reynor as a Dublin cab driver who barely makes ends meet and lives with an alcoholic mother (Toni Collette) who is drinking herself to death. Her best hope is a pricey rehab clinic and the driver must return to crime to fund it.

Denver & Delilah most recently completed Dark Places, the Gilles Paquet-Brenner-directed drama based on the novel by Gone Girl’s Gillian Flynn, and starring Chloe Moretz and Theron. A24 releases this summer. Merilees’ Foundation is producing and financing Season 3 of the primetime police procedural Motive.