25/11/2013 - After his oil rush thriller, Pioneer, Norwegian director Erik Skjoldbjærg will adapt Norwegian author Gaute Heivoll’s award-winning novel, Before I Burn, for the screen

After his 2013 conspiracy thriller Pioneer [+see also:
trailer
film profile], set at the beginning of the oil rush, Norwegian director Erik Skjoldbjærg is currently preparing an adaption of Norwegian author Gaute Heivoll’s 2010 award-winning novel, Before I Burn, about a pyromaniac who in 1978 started a number of dangerous fires in Finsland, Heivoll’s backyard.

“It is a very exciting story, with a focus on today’s society, which we think has an appeal both in Norway and abroad,” said Norwegian producer Edward A Dreyer, of Pravda Film, who – with Skjoldbjærg - bought the film rights shortly after the book had been published; it has since been sold to 22 countries including the UK.

According to Norway’s Fædrelandsvennen, Dreyer has been scouting locations for the €3.7 million production in the small community of the Songdalen municipality – “we really want to film the story there, it is a fantastic district,” Dreyer added, who has preliminarily scheduled the shooting for May-July 2014, when financing has been concluded.

Skjoldbjærg will work from a script by Norwegian writer Bjørn Olaf Johannessen, and Dreyer intends to find both members of the cast and crew in the region. “I am sure he will know what to do with the story; he is a filmmaker and an artist from my own heart,” explained the author.

When the Finsland pyromaniac ignited his first arson, Heivoll was two months old, and when it was all over – after 10 fires – he had just been christened. He grew up knowing victims and witnesses, even the arsonist, and the events were included in his first novel about “existence itself, its mental and physical pains, its blood-lust offset by the many beauties of natural forms and natural affections,” as UK’s The Independent pointed out.