Director Phillip Noyce has announced that Oscar nominee Heath Ledger and Oscar winner Rachel Weisz are in negotiations to star in a film adaptation of the Tim Winton's bestselling Australian novel "Dirt Music".
The gripping psychological love story, set on the remote and beautiful coast of Western Australia, begins shooting in the first half of 2007. The script was originally adapted by Justin Monjo, who previously adapted Winton's novel "Cloudstreet" into a stage hit, with Pip Karmel doing the most recent draft.
Dirt Music tells the story of Luther Fox, a broken man who makes his living as an illegal fisherman -- a shamateur. Before everyone in his family was killed in a freak rollover, Fox grew melons and counted stars and loved playing his guitar. Now, his life has become a "project of forgetting."
Not until he meets Georgie Jutland, the wife of White Point's most prosperous fisherman, does Fox begin to dream again and hear the dirt music -- "anything you can play on a verandah or porch," he tells Georgie, "without electricity." Like the beat of a barren heart, nature is never silent.
