“Billy Elliot” Director Stephen Daldry Picks Up the “Trash”

Andy Mulligan's thriller about a trio of boys who make their living sifting through mountains of garbage is being adapted into a feature film.

The screenplay for "Trash" is being written by Richard Curtis ("Notting Hill," "War Horse"), with Stephen Daldry ("Billy Elliot") attached to direct, reported Variety.

Here's the book's official synopsis:

Raphael is a dumpsite boy. He spends his days wading through mountains of steaming trash, sifting it, sorting it, breathing it, sleeping on it. Then one unlucky-lucky day, the world turns upside down. A small leather bag falls into his hands. It’s a bag of clues. It’s a bag of hope. It’s a bag that will change everything. Soon Raphael and his friends are running for their lives. Hounded by the police, it takes all their quick-thinking and fast-talking to stay ahead. As the net tightens, they uncover a dead man’s mission to put right a terrible wrong. And it's three street-boys against the world...

Judging from the post announcing the deal on his blog, Mulligan is thrilled with the team that will be bringing his novel to the big screen:

I get asked if I’m going to have any input whatsoever, and the answer’s no. I’m not a screen-writer, and my only experience of movies is watching them with a packet of maltesers in my hand. My first meeting with Richard made it clear that the screenwriter’s job is very different from the novelist. His instinct is for telling a story in images rather than in prose, and he made me realise I’d no more try to adapt ‘Trash’ than I’d wander into a dentist’s to give myself a filling. He knows how to do it and I’m thrilled to bits that he’s doing it to ‘Trash’.

Daldry hopes to starts shooting sometime in 2012, but first must finish work on his adaptation of Jonathan Safran Foer's "Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close," starring Tom Hanks and Sandra Bullock, about a young man trying to unlock a secret left behind by his father who was killed on 9/11.

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