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UPFRONTS 2013: The Overachievers 
Andrew Adamson is attached to direct House star Hugh Laurie in Mister Pip, an adaptation of the Lloyd Jones novel that Adamson has adapted for the screen. Shooting will begin in New Zealand next month, and Focus Features International has acquired international rights.
Laurie will play Mr. Watts, the last white man left on the war-torn island of Bougainville. Asked to open a school there, he reads the kids his favorite novel, Great Expectations. He bonds with the children over the book, which sheds some perspective on their own difficult lives. Adamson will produce with Leslie Urdang, Dean Vanech and Robin Scholes. Eyeworks New Zealand and Agio Capital are co-financing with Olympus Pictures, and the New Zealand Film Commission, NZ on Air and TV3 are also investors. UTA Independent Film Group put together the pieces.
Adamson, who co-directed the first two installments of Shrek and directed the first two The Chronicles of Narnia films, is also aligned with James Cameron on a series of 3D Cirque du Soleil features, the first of which has already been shot.
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Sounds dreadful. At least Hugh Laurie is in it. Hopefully he’s allowed to be funny. An extraordinary trait of his which bad film directors have always failed to allow him to exercise.
Laurie was the reader of an audio book version of GREAT EXPECTATIONS, several years ago. I wonder if listening to that gave someone the idea of casting him.
It’s a great book, though grisly in parts. Should make an interesting film. The synopsis does make it sound dull but the setting should allow for a decent trailer to pull in some punters.
One of my top 5 favorite actors! Very excited to see the film.
I enjoyed reading Mr. Pip and was drawn into the possible reality of it. It tends to place a new perspective on the advantages and use of a well known book such as Dickens ‘Great Expectations’. It reminds some of us of our own childhood days when our mother would sit us on her lap and read to us. But, also shows how the Island’s listener’s relate to such a narration. Through the story of Mr. Pip the children are drawn out of the care-worn world they live in for a while and given food for thought, even though they lack other resources. To me Mr. Watts, the teacher, became a brave hero throughout all his adversity. He was a perceptible man who felt out of place where he was and was able to escape for a while, along with his listeners into a different world but one of his and Dicken’s making. There is a sadness about him, a wistfulness, a longing and maybe a need for acceptance among the people he lives with. He is a very lonely man and finds some solace in Matilda’s company because she is as rapt as he is about Dicken’s story and she begins to give him hope. If people could survive the sinking of Titanic, then so too could Matilda escape her Island.