Announced back in 2019, Richard Kelly (Donnie Darko, Southland Tales) is working on a biopic covering the life and career of “The Twilight Zone” mastermind Rod Serling, and we’ve got a little update on the project courtesy of an interview with Kelly over on Coming Soon.
Kelly reveals in the chat that he’s been working on the Serling biopic “for several years,” with the film set to adapt the memoir written by the late Rod Serling’s daughter, Anne Serling.
“Well, that is a very special project. It’s a very ambitious project and we want to get it right,” Kelly explains. “We want to make sure we have the right talent and the right budget and all the elements need to be just perfect for that project to get made and we have such respect for Rod Serling’s legacy and the enormous footprint that he left in our business and in our culture. So, we’ve been working on that for several years. We’ve been working closely with Anne Serling, Rod’s daughter. I’ve adapted her memoir that she published about her father and his life and it’s a very ambitious approach to a biopic and it involves a lot of fantasy elements.”
Kelly continues, “There is a big fantasy science fiction concept in the sort of approach that we’re taking to try and tell the story of his life. So, that’s a really complicated, difficult needle to thread. We are definitely working on it and hopefully at some point, we’ll get that project off the ground and it’s really just about getting all of the elements to work. So fingers crossed that we’ll get there and we can really pay a tribute to Rod’s life in the best possible way.”
Anne Serling’s memoir is titled As I Knew Him: My Dad, Rod Serling, published in 2014.