Minnie Driver & Patrick Dempsey In Talks For ‘The Household Guide To Dying’, The Comeback Film Of Oz Director Emma-Kate Croghan — AFM

EXCLUSIVE: Minnie Driver (Good Will Hunting) and Patrick Dempsey (Grey’s Anatomy) are in talks to star in Emma-Kate Croghan’s dramedy The Household Guide to Dying, based on the book by Debra Adelaide. 

The film marks Australian director Croghan’s return to features after a 25-year absence. The director first made waves in 1996 with debut Love And Other Catastrophes, which garnered five Australian Film Institute award nominations and was picked up by Fox Searchlight.

She followed that up in 1999 with Strange Planet, starring Naomi Watts, but has only returned since then to direct a segment of music documentary I’m Only Looking: The Best of INXS back in 2004.

Ellen Wander of Film Bridge International is selling The Household Guide to Dying at this week’s American Film Market in Las Vegas. CAA Media Finance and WME Independent are co-repping domestic.

The plot reads: “Acerbic household influencer Delia Bennett decides to write ‘The Book’ on how to die well. When things don’t go according to plan, she is forced to consider that dying well is not as simple as laundry. Delia embarks on a road trip with her daughters to come to terms with her past and help her family face the future.”

Pic is being produced by Leesa Kahn (Come Away) and Catriona Hughes (Kokoda: 39th Battalion) of GFN Productions, as well as James Spring (Finding Your Feet) of Fred Films. 

As for Croghan’s long absence from directing, she moved to LA after Strange Planet, ostensibly to work on an adaptation of Philip K Dick’s A Scanner Darkly with Charlie Kaufman writing and Jersey films producing, but the project didn’t take flight (Richard Linklater later directed a different version). She continued to write and develop film and TV projects for the next decade but then changed course, first trying her hand at teaching and then in 2011 selling up her family home to sail the world for a year.

Driver is coming off Amazon-acquired sci-fi The Assessment and David Ayer action film The Beekeeper. Dempsey recently starred in Michael Mann’s Ferrari and Eli Roth’s Thanksgiving and is in production on anticipated Paramount series Dexter: Original Sin.