According to Deadline, Michael Shannon is planning to make his debut as a director with an adaptation of the play Eric Larue, which first premiered in 2002 by Brett Neveu. The protagonist of the film is a woman named Janice, whose son Eric, who was 17 at the time of the events, fatally shot three of his friends. Janice still hasn’t seen her boyfriend three months after his arrest, and she hasn’t figured out how to cope with the events that transpired either.
As Janice prepares for a meeting with the moms of the other boys in church as well as a long-delayed visit to her son who is incarcerated, the narrative shifts away from the violence itself and instead focuses on how we choose to think and act in order to survive traumatic experiences. According to Neveu, who is also adapting the screenplay, the original play was written as a reaction to the shooting massacre that took place at Columbine High School in Colorado in 1999. After 15 years, a shooter opened fire at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, as Shannon was in the middle of directing another production called Traitor.
Following these two shootings, Neveu decided to convert his original play into a feature picture, which would now be directed by Shannon. Shannon explained, “Eric Larue has so much to say about our country, about the way we try (sometimes quite ineptly) to deal with the trauma of living here, which is so insidious because it does not present itself overtly in concrete terms the majority of the time.” Eric Larue is an author. Shannon is a writer. In addition, when he was asked about his choice, he stated that Eric Larue’s writing is typical of many fantastic stories in that it operates on both a broad and a more specific scale simultaneously. As soon as I finished reading the screenplay, I was certain that I had to direct it. I saw it. I was aware of it. I was able to sense it. And because, in the end, it is such an exceptionally delicate object, I wanted to make sure that it was handled with the utmost care in every respect and that it got the exact touch that it needed.
When asked about the partnership, Shannon shared her thoughts as follows: “I find it interesting to align with artists possessing the most vivid imaginations, the most stringent yet empathetic senses of morality, and the most passionate and rigorous disciplines to create worlds and stories that contribute to our experience and understanding of what it is to be a human being in this day and age and, particularly, this country.” Sarah Green from Brace Cove Productions, Karl Hartman from Big Indie Pictures, and Jina Panebianco from CaliWood Pictures are the producers of the Eric Larue television series. R. Wesley Sierk III, Meghan Schumacher, Jeff Nichols, Byron Wetzel, Joh D. Straley, and Declan Baldwin are all contributing to the production of the show as executive producers.