More Artifacts

Greg Mottola, who is adapting Important Artifacts for Natalie and Brad Pitt, has talked a bit more about that film to the Wall Street Journal.

It’s a romantic story between a female New York Times writer and this male successful photographer, and there’s a slight chance that maybe that will be Brad Pitt – but we’ll see. But I wanted to get back to writing, and I wanted to sort of jumpstart it, and it was a really interesting book; the book is very conceptual – it’s literally a book of photographs with captions, and it’s a fake auction catalogue. It’s like a conceptual art piece, looking at a relationship through people’s stuff, the gifts they give each other and little tiny bits of description from texts of notes and emails, and it’s like an archaeological dig through a relationship. Now, turning that into a movie has been extremely challenging, but it’s a cool challenge; I mean, it’s got a little bit of a Charlie Kaufman-esque weirdness to it, the way I approached it. And maybe if I think I’ve done a good enough job as a writer I’ll ask them to consider me as the director, but for now I’m just thinking about it as a writer. You know, it’s not a bad time to be in business with Natalie; she’s had a good year.