You may remember the Red Riding Trilogy as a series of sprawling TV movies made in Britain that got limited theatrical releases in the United States, but did you realize they started as a particularly ambitious book? Writer David Peace was named one of the best young British novelists by Granta magazine in 2003, and now apparently the movie industry is taking a shine to his work-- he also wrote the book that inspired The Damned United, the soccer-based film that starred Michael Sheen last year. Now Peace is going even more Hollywood--Warner Bros. has picked up the rights to his novel Occupied City. Whereas Red Riding was about crime in Britain over a series of decades, Occupied is distinctly different, a thriller surrounding a 1948 robbery at a Tokyo bank. You certainly couldn't accuse the guy of being stuck in a rut.
There are no immediate plans for putting the adaptation into development, though with Steve Zaillian adapting Red Riding for a Hollywood remake, Peace's name may come to mean a lot more in the coming years. Occupied City is part of a planned trilogy of novels set during the United States occupation of Japan, with the first, Tokyo Year Zero, published in 2007.
