EXCLUSIVE: After winning the Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar for Women Talking, Sarah Polley is on to the most epic undertaking of her filmmaking career thus far, as Deadline understands that the filmmaker is in talks to helm a live-action take on Bambi in very early development at Disney.
While the studio first signaled its intention to adapt Bambi for live-action back in early 2020, bringing Geneva Robertson-Dworet and Lindsey Beer aboard as writers and Depth of Field to produce, there’s no word yet on the writer and producers attached to the project at this point in time, or when it might be put in motion, given unpredictable strike conditions, for starters.
The film is of course the coming-of-age story of Bambi, the young deer struck by tragedy who counts amongst her woodland pals the rabbit Thumper and a skunk named Flower. An adaptation of Felix Salten’s 1923 novel Bambi, a Life in the Woods, released by RKO Radio Pictures in 1942, the original Bambi was just the fifth animated feature ever to emerge from Disney. The film helmed by David Hand and assorted sequence directors grossed over $267M worldwide, landed Academy Award nominations for Best Sound, Song and Original Music Score, and has endured as a classic over the years, assuredly continuing to traumatize young viewers with its famous depiction of the death of Bambi’s mother at the hands of a hunter to this day.
Pic was entered into the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress, given its cultural, historic and aesthetic significance, in December 2011.
Polley’s take on Bambi will be the latest in a long line of live-action films to adapt Disney’s classic animated features. The most recent installment in this series, which has done huge business fo the studio, is the Rob Marshall-helmed The Little Mermaid, which has grossed over $414M since bowing in theaters on May 26th. Polley will certainly be in good company if and when her deal for the project closes, joining a list of directors tapped by Disney for these films that also includes Jon Favreau, Kenneth Branagh, Niki Caro, Guy Ritchie, Tim Burton and Robert Zemeckis, to name only a few.
Polley’s acclaimed ensemble drama Women Talking, based on the novel by Miriam Toews, drew on the real 2010 story of a Bolivian Mennonite colony to examine the impossible choice grappled with by the women of an isolated religious community following numerous incidents of sexual assault by the men they thought they knew. Polley directed the film from her script, seeing it released by United Artists Releasing following its fall bow at Telluride. It also earned her Critics’ Choice and WGA Awards, a Golden Globe nomination and other major accolades.
Other directorial credits for Polley include the WGA Award and Cinema Eye Honors Award-winning documentary Stories We Tell, examining the family of storytellers of which she’s a part, and the acclaimed dramas Take This Waltz and Away from Her. She began her career as an actor, starting out as a child on films like The Adventures of Baron Munchausen before going on to star in titles like Dawn of the Dead, and is represented by WME, GGA in Canada, Circle of Confusion and Jackoway Austen Tyerman.
