Mary Shelley and Percy Shelley Film with Elle Fanning

“A Storm in the Stars” is an independent film in development for 2016.  Elle Fanning has been long announced to play Mary Shelley in the project, with Bel Powley to play step-sister Claire Clairmont. The project has been on development boards for about a year and gained traction with director Haifaa Al-Mansour signing on to direct the period re-telling of the love affair between poet Percy Shelley and Mary Shelley, (then still Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin) which resulted in the writing of Frankenstein. The script is by Regency Romance novelist Emma Jensen scripting her first full-length film, depicting the relationship between Mary and Percy when Claire moves in with them, and the drama surrounding the writing of the novel, said to be “a fresh take on the unconventional life of 18 year-old Mary Shelley and her tempestuous love affair with charismatic poet Percy Shelley, the notorious trip to Lake Geneva with Lord Byron and the rocky road that made her into an icon”. No casting of Byron or others has yet been mentioned.

See A Storm In The Stars Film Shoots in Ireland Update

Al-Mansour, Saudi Arabia’s first female director, who came on the scene with her critically acclaimed debut film about a girl trying to win a bicycle “Wadjda”, outed the project when she announced her attachment on Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show. The film seems now firmly underway after getting a boost at the 2015 Cannes Film Market with England’s HanWay Films handling foreign sales and the addition of Douglas Booth to play Percy Bysshe Shelley. Booth played the son in the Paramount version of “Noah”. Production is scheduled to begin in the fall of 2015. There is no US distributor announced yet. UTA Independent Film Group put the project together for Gidden Media and Parallel Film, and will be representing North American rights to the film. Joanne Burstein and Rebecca Miller serve as Executive Producers. Douglas Booth, Al-Mansour, and Bel Powley are all represented by UTA, while Elle Fanning is repped by WME. UK Distributor Artificial Eye picked up the as yet to be made film at Cannes. In a competition between versions of monstrous inspiration, this project seems to be gaining traction over a competing film project “Mary Shelley’s Monster” with “Game of Thrones’ ” Sophie Turner announced .

Reports suggest this film story takes place in the period starting a year before the summer of 1816 until the publishing of the novel two years later in 1818, with the events surrounding the “Gothic” summer at Villa Diodati in Geneva, the well-known scary story competition, and the relationships before and following, when the Shelleys (they weren’t yet married until the end of 1816), were hounded by scandal and Claire joined them as a near permanent third-wheel. This is the period following the elopement of 1814 and some of the same relationships related in “Frankenstein Diaries: The Romantics – The Secret Memoirs of Mary Shelly” which depicts these characters as this extraordinary relationship was in its formation, and would appear in later volumes.