18/11/2011

US director Martin Scorsese will introduce Norwegian author Jo Nesbø's serial police detective Harry Hole to the big screen.

Today, both UK production company Working Title Films and Nesbø have confirmed to Swedish daily DN that Scorsese will direct The Snowman, scripted by Matthew Michael Carnahan, which will be produced by Working Title founders Tim Bevan and Eric Fellner, with Nesbø (pictured) and his US agent Niclas Salomonsson as executive producers.

Since 1997, Harry Hole has investigated nine cases for Nesbø's thriller series, but the Norwegian writer has so far been reluctant to accept offers for film adaptations. "That is, if Scorsese calls one day, I will think again," he used to joke, according to DN. "Scorsese was always my great favourite; when I was a student, the poster for Taxi Driver was all I had on my wall."

The Snowman, the seventh novel in the series of the anti-authority, anti-sobriety Oslo detective, went straight to No 10 on the New York Times' bestseller list, when it was published in the US. Nesbø will not insist that the film take place in Oslo (like US director David Fincher's filmed The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, from the Swedish Millennium trilogy, in Stockholm).

"Questions such as the nature of evil and moral dillemmas are more important than Oslo," Nesbø added. In Nesbø's international break, Hole is trying to to find a young mother who has disappeared - her son has found her scarf round a snowman's neck; she is just one of many mothers who have gone missing, so the detective realises he is confronted with a serial killer.

Working Title most recently signed Swedish director Tomas Alfredsson's international spy hit, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy [+see also:
film review
trailer
film profile]; Norwegian director Morten Tyldum's Headhunters, the first film from a Nesbø novel, has just passed 553,000 admissions in Norway and sold worldwide through TrustNordisk, including the US, and most recently China(HGC Entertainment).