Ricky Gervais is the talent (well, half of) behind one of the most influential TV shows of the last decade, The Office. His follow-up, Extras, was less innovative and touching, but still excellent. So what is Gervais’s next project? This September will see the release of The Invention of Lying, a comedy about a world where no one ever lies, which Gervais’s co-directing and co-writing. But next year sees the release at his first attempt writing a feature film, Cemetery Junction. The plot follows three men working at an insurance company in 1970’s England. It stars Ralph Fiennes, Emily Watson, and Gervais himself. It’s also co-written by Stephen Merchant, the other half of the writing team behind The Office and Extras, so expect the comedy to be of top-class quality.
But that’s not the end of Cemetery Junction. Gervais also plans to adapt the premise into a TV series as well, as the idea was originally for television. Gervais said to Empire: “We thought that when you do a TV show and then do a film, generally it’s awful. One, it taints the film with a TV brush. It breaks its credibility a little bit. I don’t want to do a film that’s just an extended TV episode. So we want to give the film its best shot and treat it with the reverence a film deserves”. Sounds like a great idea.
Gervais is also working on a children’s animated film he created entitled Flanimals, due out in 2011.
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